Philological perspectives on the Southeastern Nigerian diasporaContours; a journal of the African diaspora 2 2, 239-87. [ISSN 1543-902X], journal deceased.

Tone typo: The second word in fn. 27 (p. 270) should be Ékpè [HL] and not Èkpe [LL]; the LL item refers to a dance genre (i e. a subtypeof the large category of performances called in Ìgbo égwu [HH]) rather than to the title society under discussion which happens to deployits own proprietary masked dance representations. The latter institution is denoted by the HL item wherever it is found, including thesouthern and eastern Ìgbo-speaking area (cf. Ígwè, Ìgbo-English Dictionary, University Press Ltd., Ìbàdàn 1985-1999, p. 155) andspecifically in Árụ (= colonial Arochukwu , cf. video interview with Ézè Árụ by I. Miller, 2008) where the title society has big politicalclout. Two observations show that the respective forms with HL and LL represent one single word which traveled distinct historical paths,as opposed to being random near-homophones. First, festival songs of Èkpe [LL] in Ọmàáhyá (= colonial Ụmụahia ) includenumerous emblematic references to ágụ [H!H] 'leopard' (cf. E. Íkeokwú long essay, Department of Linguistics & Nigerian Languages,University of Nigeria, Ǹsụka 1984, pp. 18f.). Second, the Ẹdó word for 'leopard' is èkpen (cf. Melzian, Concise Dictionary of the BìníLanguage of Southern Nigeria, London, 1937, p. 53), with the same LL as in the Ìgbo word for the dance genre. (The nasalization of theroot in the Ẹdó reflex is probably related to the syllabic nasal which constitutes the noun prefix, sometimes singular and sometimes plural,of 'leopard/panthère' in many of the languages sampled in the Benue-Congo Comparative Wordlist, Ìbàdàn 1968, pp. 222-25.) In sum,the existence of the form ékpè [HL] in Ìgbo-speaking communities reflects the borrowing from Èfịk of the historic word for 'leopard'along with its Èfịk pitch pattern of [HL], used as the proper name for the leopard-themed title society which flourished in the catchmentarea of the Èfịk trade empire known to European merchants and colonists as Old Calabar (cf. Talbot, Peoples of Southern Nigeria,1926, pp. 183f.). This borrowing endowed many southern and eastern Ìgbo-speaking communities with a secondary lexical item separatefrom the primary/inherited Ìgbo form of the word with LL, which had meanwhile lost in Ìgbo the literal denotation of 'leopard' (havingbeen supplanted by the hypokoristic ágú, literally 'the ravenous one', cf. águú or águó [HH!H] 'hunger') and become semantically opaquein the specialized context of phrases like ígbá èkpe [H!H LL] referring to heroically vigorous dance-play — so-called from its emulationof what the 1986 Nobel laureate in literature might like to call the leopard's tigritude or more prosaically, a type of dance requiringmuch energetic action and so restricted to able-bodied young men (Ígwè p. 155).

Missing from references:

Crabb, D. [1965]. Ekoid Languages of Ogoja, Eastern Nigeria. Cambridge University Press.

Jones, G. [1957]. Report of the position, status & influence of chiefs & natural rulers in the Eastern Region of Nigeria.Government Printer, Énugwú.

Significant empirical wrinkle: The cartographic errorism — what would today be called unavoidable and regrettable targeting error —responsible for sticking the name Calabar on the Efịk capital is much less complex in legendary inspiration, and slightly less farfetchedin geographic distance, than modern historians have supposed. As quoted in the paper (p. 254), Jones wondered whether the Europeanattribution of the name Old Calabar to the Efịk people could be a reflection of the Korome myth of origin [… about] the place which theOpukoroye line of Kalaḅarị kings claimed as their original home (1965, 159). More plausibly and prosaically, Ejituwu suggests that theintended referent of the old term in this myth was not the Efịk-speaking village group on the Rio da Cruz , but instead aKalaḅarị-speaking settlement (subsequently abandoned) on a branch of the Rio Real estuary labeled Old Calabar River by Barbot's1699 New Correct Mapp of Calbar River (reprinted by Barbot 1732, 462 and Ejituwu 1998, 137). Further ambiguity (as if any wererequired) is supplied by the fact that when New Calabar itself segmented from 1879 to 1885 […] [t]he Kalaḅarị in Bakana, Abonema andBuguma continued to regard New Calabar as Elem Kalaḅarị, which means 'Old Calabar', and the latter continued to appear in officialdocuments till 1931 (Ejituwu 1998, 142). None of this confusion is surprising, given that adnominal modifiers like old and new areindexical shifters whereas map terms ideally aren't. But unlike Jones' frankly speculative account of the Efịk mistaken identity forCalabar , Ejituwu's explanation of the mishap has independent documentary support and is moreover simpler: no need to assume that

Dutch mappers of 9ja's eastern coast had even indirect access to Kalaḅarị dynastic tales, if what happened is that they ploddinglyreproduced some coastal traders' casual misplacement of the older of the Old Calabars — i.e. the one so designated by locals in the 17thcentury — by a few hundred miles, to a different slaving depot a few estuaries further along to the east, albeit in a very different linguisticterritory.

Barbot, J. [1732]. A description of the coasts of north and south-Guinea […]. Churchill, London.

Ejituwu, N. [1998]. Old Calabar rediscovered. The Multidisciplinary Approach to African History; essays in honor ofEbiegberi Joe Alagoa, edited by N. Ejituwu, 133-50. Hisis Press, Port Harcourt, for University of Port Harcourt Press.

PHILOLOG ICAL PERSPECTIV ES ON THE

SOU THEASTERN NIG ERIAN DIASPORA

Victor ManfrediAfrican Studies Center,

Boston University

l exi c a l `` i gbo i sm s in languages of the Western Hemisphere are few compared

to estimated numbers of captive ⁄gbo-speakers who lived here some 200 years ago.

This fact, initially mysterious and long buried in philological rubble, may on second

thought be informative. In Abakuá-related vocabulary collected by Cabrera from

Cubans tracing themselves to the region now called southeastern Nigeria, including

two dozen named ⁄gbo subregions, appear thousands of ”fik-derived items but less

than ten with ⁄gbo roots. The divergence between ethnicity and language in this case

implies that the historical ties of Afrocuban Abakuá culture to the ”fik-speaking

region of West Africa are partly indirect. One possibility is that a share of ”fik-

medium Abakuá was brought to Cuba not by ”fik-speakers, but by ⁄gbo-speakers,

and this is independently plausible. Anecdotally, Nigerian historians report that, in

the orbit of the 18th century Àr∂ (“Arochukwu”) trading oligarchy, ⁄gbo-speakers

learned ”fik terminology alongside nonverbal nsibiri (or nsibidi, nchibidi) signs

during initiation into the ãkpå club—Abakuá’s historic model.1 Some of the ⁄gboitems in Cabrera’s Abakuá corpus bear hallmarks of Àr∂ dialect; two are emblematic

of Àr∂ religion as studied by NwÄ™ga (1984). The implication is that some

differences between the Cuban and ”fik versions of ãkpå preceded the Middle

Passage. This can be tested by comparing Abakuá texts with their Àr∂ counterparts.

If the conjecture is confirmed, then ãkpå/nsibiri joins L∞k∞mi and Kik˘≠≠ng≠ as

regional lingue franche acting as media of African-American cultural transmission.

Mother tongues, and theories of creolization, have less bearing on the process. In

2 4 0 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

particular, ãkpå/nsibiri attests a style of diaspora built on ethnolinguistic aliases, and

with an elective affinity to orientalist narratives.

W ES T ER N ER R O R IS M , NEGA T IV E ÌGB O IS M S

A ND A F R IC A NIS T - A M ER IC A NIS T R ES EA R C H

Philology is more than textual critique; to Edward Saïd it’s

…the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts. …Rather than alienation

and hostility to another time and a different culture, philology as applied to

Weltliteratur involved a profound humanistic spirit deployed with generosity and,

if I may use the word, hospitality. …[H]umanism is the only and I would go so far

as saying the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices

that disfigure human history. (Saïd 2003)

A good example of philological disfigurement is the way European slavers and

imperialists transcribed African personal and place names (YÄò 1978). Call it

“Western error-ism”—the linguistic equivalent of cluster bombs, those

indiscriminate modern weapons which

…cause humanitarian harm not only because they are area weapons, but also

because a large percentage of their bomblets or grenades do not explode on

impact. These explosive duds remain live and dangerous and are frequently set off

by civilians after the strikes. (Docherty & Gelasco 2003, 103)2

Avoiding spelling shrapnel while defusing “dud” labels in the archives, forensic

historians have ascribed plausible linguistic origins to many African captives shipped

to the Western Hemisphere in the 17th-19th centuries (Curtin & Vansina 1964;

Nw£kãjò & Eltis 2002). The inferred source communities roughly coincide with

African cultural traits observed in the Americas.3 But even with the best data, the

two sides of the transatlantic equation—ethnic departures and cultural arrivals

—don’t necessarily match. Such discrepancies are puzzling at first, but on closer

examination they open philological perspectives on the past.

In Cuba, Ortíz (1924) records many Bantuisms (largely Kik˘≠≠ng≠): dozens of

vocabulary loans plus a corpus of Palo ritual expressions—opaque poetic phrases like

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 4 1

the Homeric ‘formulas’ (Kiparsky 1976). Cuban Yor∞bÄisms are more numerous

and more stereotyped: less plain vocabulary (mostly names of processed foods), but

more personal names, and a huge repertoire of Lucumí ritual song. Mandekan

languages supply a few dozen words but no performance literature.4 Taking all

Afrocuban linguistic heritage together, Yor∞bÄ seems over-represented compared to

the historic presence of its speakers.5 Setting aside how such differentials arise, the

disproportion calls attention to itself, especially because it’s not isolated.

Another American site where Africanisms disaggregate, by grammatical type and

relative to source, is the Gullah-speaking archipelago of the Georgia/South Carolina

coast. Turner (1949) transcribes over 3,000 personal names of probable African

origin (lines i-ii below); a few hundred African nouns in daily use (line iii); and a few

dozen text-embedded items (line iv ). Turner didn’t try to choose among multiple

etymologies, but standard cognate criteria yield statistical patterns. Many source

languages being closely similar, arbitrariness can be further reduced by merging

results into the three large Niger-Congo subgroups represented in the sample:6

Niger-Congo

Mandekan Benue-Kwa Bantuless Bantu(i) African personal names

→Gullah personal names 31% (n=632) 42% (858) 21% (425)

(ii) African nouns→Gullah personal names (=superset of (i)) 25% (909) 41% (1,467) 27% (972)

(iii) African nouns→Gullah ordinary nouns 25% (164) 13% (34) 40% (100)

(iv) African vocabulary items→Gullah textual formulas 100% (88) ∅ ∅

As in Afrocuba, the Gullah percentages show that the mix of sources varies by item

type. Of the four types distinguished in Turner’s sample, only (iii) approximates

Gullah-speakers’ assumed ancestral profile: between a third and a half Bantu-

speaking (Curtin 1969, 157; cf. Wood 1974, 335).7

Some Afroamerican populations diverge from source languages more radically.

⁄gbo, the main idiom of southeastern Nigeria, has effectively vanished from diaspora

communities formed in the 17th-19th centuries. Scant linguistic ⁄gboisms from that

time appear anywhere in Cuba, Haiti or the southeastern U.S.—places otherwise rich

in African linguistic heritage and where many ⁄gbo speakers lived two centuries ago

(Ortíz 1924; Debien & Houdaille 1964; W.P.A. 1940).8 In Cuba, among thousands of

Abakuá expressions collected by Cabrera (1988) from people identified as “Carabalí”

2 4 2 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

(a category including ⁄gbo speakers), I find less than ten ⁄gbo items; most of the rest

seem to have either ”fik or Kik˘≠≠ng≠ origin. Relative to populations, ”fik words

especially are over-represented in American outcomes at ⁄gbo expense.

The anomaly could be fixed mechanically in two ways: count more ⁄gboisms in

the outcomes than previously known, and/or fewer ⁄gbo-speakers in the trade than

errorist labels suggest. Both have been tried. The first tack is taken by Chambers

(1997) and Gomez (1998) but their evidence has been assessed as wishful (Northrup

2000).9 Moreover, because the rarity of ⁄gboisms recurs across diverse American

plantation economies, particularist explanations are inherently liable to overlook a

generalization pertaining to the source, hence the initial plausibility of the second

option: reducing the estimated number of ⁄gbo-speakers carried away. Comparing

sex ratios of captives and modern census figures, Inikori boosts the estimated share

of people trafficked from non-⁄gbo areas in the Nigerian “Middle Belt” (the

linguistic fragmentation zone on the savanna fringe) and concludes “…that ⁄gboscould not have contributed more than one-third of the total number of slaves sold in

southeastern Nigeria between 1750 and 1830” (1988, 35).10 However, the image of a

Middle Belt depopulated by slave raiding—a staple of colonial historiography

(Buchanan & Pugh 1955)—remains speculative (Mason 1969), and even if true can’t

change enough numbers to explain the lack of American ⁄gboisms entirely.

The matter is thus moot: adjusted tallies of ⁄gbo sources and outcomes leave the

general problem untouched. Absent radically new data, new inferences must go

beyond censuses and word counts to focus on intervening mechanisms. This has the

advantage of being constrained, not just by available direct observations, which are

sparse and error-strewn, but also by analogous cases elsewhere. One possibile

mediating factor is ‘creolization’—unusually abrupt linguistic or cultural shift

between generations—but, as reviewed in the next section below, the logic of this

term is incurably circular. All cultures change, and no one has ever proved that

particular types of change are special to ‘creole’ contexts. That’s not to say that all

changes are equally possible at a given time, but simply to deny that changes

inherently divide into ‘creolizing’ and ‘noncreolizing’ kinds.11 Therefore it’s

worthwhile to consider other theories of information transfer across generations.

Archaeology and genetics show that languages and Y-chromosome markers have

evolved in close parallel during 70-100,000 years since Homo sapiens first left Africa

(Cavalli-Sforza 2000, 167). Language ‘families’—despite tendentious use of this

kinship term by Schleicher and other Darwinian linguists in the 1860’s—aren’t

encoded in the genome, therefore any linkage of the two types of information is

newsworthy and highlights why the gross correspondence should break down in

smaller, more recent spatiotemporal intervals.12 As migrants everywhere attest, such

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 4 3

breakdown typically takes place when children fail to learn a parental language in

favor of a language of the local community. This ordinary kind of shift did not fail in

the transatlantic African diapora, leading to acquisition of colonial languages by

American-born African descendants. Even speakers of Trinidad Yor∞bÄ who

“arrived not as slaves, but with the legal status of immigrant indentured laborers”

(Warner-Lewis 1996, 26) had no active knowledge of an African ancestral tongue

after a few generations, despite their concerted resistance to “language recession”

(Warner-Lewis 1996, 173). As Prof. Mufwene rightly emphasized at the DePaul

conference, the Trinidad example shows the irrelevance of slave status to first

language shift per se. Indeed, the Cuban ⁄gbo case shows that political differences

between various captive populations were potentially more significant for language

outcomes, than differences between captive and noncaptive groups. This is so

because observed vocabulary survivals belong less to ordinary speaking knowledge

and more to cultural esoterics like names and ritual phraseology.

Biologists distinguish two ways in which information moves among individuals:

horizontal and vertical (within or between generations, respectively). Darwinian

theory restricts genetic transfer to the latter, inherently slower vector (Cavalli-Sforza

2000, 180), but since cultural differences aren’t genetically fixed, culture can take

either path (Boas 1920, 313).13 Language is a limiting case because of a maturational

constraint: first language acquisition has a biologically determined critical period—a

window that closes gradually at the end of infancy and early childhood, past which

fluency can’t normally occur. Thanks to the window, some kinds of language

transmission favor the vertical route. For example, radiocarbon and ecological

evidence shows that the Indo-European language stock took between five and ten

thousand years to split into its present ten branches. Scholars agree that family-

internal changes (isoglosses ) first moved horizontally through the Indo-European

area, as borrowings between embryonic branches, but the changes eventually

increased to the point they were confined to the vertical mode, remaining within

individual branches (Meillet 1908, 4; 1922, 6; Robins 1967, 181).14 By hypothesis,

vertical transmission takes over when horizontal changes accumulate to the point

they alter information relevant to the critical period. To define this threshold is the

main goal of historical linguistics, as indeed of population genetics (Hull 1978);

pretheoretically, certain phenomena tend to fall on one side or the other of the line.

Word order patterns and inflections are either passed along to children within the

critical period, or else never; vocabulary and regional ‘accent’ are much less sensitive

to the life-cycle stage at which they’re learned.15

The Boas-Herskovits program of African-American historical anthropology—

recently dissed by Afrocentrists as “not successful” (Holloway & Vass 1993, xv) and

2 4 4 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

by a leading creolist as “suspect” and “naïve” (Palmie 1993, 337)—broadly fits the

cultural information theory just outlined.16 After noting that the distribution of

African cultures in the western hemisphere is patchy, both within communities of

African origin and between them, Herskovits makes a subtler point: the “scale of

intensity of New World Africanisms” is more than the scattered grist of history, it’s

also food for cognitive science—an interdisciplinary field which the anthropologist

invoked before its time. Few would deny that demography’s main cause is economic.

Forced labor was deployed in the Western Hemisphere when and where it was, above

all because it was the most efficient way available at the time to raise productivity in a

“muscle-driven, plant-based, land-constrained agrarian economy” (Alam 2003).17

But Herskovits observes how the empirical pattern of diaspora also depends on

noneconomic factors, including the ontology of culture—a category broadly defined

as “something learned” (1945, 57). Understanding why an immigrant language is

neither preserved, nor lost, all in one piece, presumes a general theory about how the

various parts of a language adhere to humans and to each other:

[T]he underlying structure of the aboriginal tongues persists longest, and is most

resistant to change, while vocabulary and pronunciation exhibit the most non-

African elements. But it is just the grammatical configurations of any language

that lodge deepest in linguistic habit-patterns, and that present the greatest

difficulties where a new language is to be learned—far more than either phonetics

or vocabulary, though this last is easier learned than pronunciation. (1945, 60)18

Herskovits’ cognitive variables are plausible on their face; after 60 years, they can

be refined and applied to richer data. The Cuban pattern summarized above suggests

that the effect of the mother tongue (which Chomsky calls competence or I-language)

is distinct from that of two other phenomena: (i) lingue franche or regional second

languages (used with widely varying degrees of fluency); and (ii) textual speech

(Chomskyan performance or E-language). Neither (i) nor (ii) is restricted to the

vertical mode; there’s independent reason to doubt that vertical transmission

underlies many New World Africanisms; most importantly, both of the horizontal

variables clearly affect the problem at hand.

As to factor (i), a Yor∞bÄ variety called “Licomin” (L∞k∞mi ) had by the early

17th century been explicitly compared to medieval Latin as the administrative vehicle

of the western “Niger” delta.19 Earlier still, the lingua franca of the lower “Congo”

river basin was probably a variety of Kik˘≠≠ng≠ similar to what’s now called Kituba

(Swartenbroeckx 1952; van Bulck 1953, 107; Vellut 1989, 306).20 If so, then large

numbers of mother tongue speakers need not be the main reason that varieties of

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 4 5

Yor∞bÄ and Kik˘≠≠ng≠ are the major sources of linguistic Africanisms in the

Americas.21 Although ⁄gbo was a medium of trans-ethnic trade (Northrup 2000,

15), there’s no evidence it played a cultic or political role.22 Indeed, phonetic and

morphological differences among ⁄gbo dialects (some of which, some speakers still

publicly portray as mutually unintelligible languages) continue to hinder the

emergence of a regional standard spoken variety, despite the nationalistic impulse of

the Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-70). Today the mother tongue remains disfavored in

literate pan-⁄gbo meetings, whether outside Nigeria or within.23

The next question is what, if not ⁄gbo, was the lingua franca in the southeast edge

of the ⁄gbo-speaking area. Here factor (ii) comes in: ãkpå texts were symbolic capital

for long-distance trade in the region (Latham 1973; Northrup 1978). A big share of

the ãkpå network, which supplied European slavers through Bight of Biafra ports,

was administered (mainly between the Ÿm§, ◊b®ónyi and “Cross” rivers) by

oracular agents of the Àr∂ village group.24 Àr∂

…was close to the leading trade emporiums of eastern Nigeria: about six hours by

canoe from Calabar, two days from Bonny and Kalabari. In other words [Àr∂]

commanded the geographical point in the hinterland through which flowed the

hinterland products—men and commodities—through the Cross River as well as

through the Eastern Delta ports to the sea. (Dókã & “kåji¥bÄ 1990, 44)

“kåji¥bÄ (1986) “estimated that about 70% of the slaves carried from [the Bight

of Biafra] probably passed through Àr∂ hands” (Ÿjå©ma & Újó®kµ 1992, 300).25

Attesting the scale of Àr∂ influence in the region are “over one hundred and fifty

Àr∂ colonies… founded between 1700 and 1900” (Dókã & “kåji¥bÄ 1990, 1).26 It

is observed that “[m]ost Àr∂ till this day are bilingual and speak both ⁄gbo and

”fik” (Dókã & “kåji¥bÄ 1990, 158 fn. 32) and that Àr∂ ãkpå meetings comprise

“secret” performances, learned by adults, comprising ”fik texts as well as nsibiri, an

ideographic script cum gestural code (Daryell 1910, 1911; Talbot 1912; ÀbÄl™g¥1978, 92-94; Ÿjå©ma 1994, 1996).27 Not being phonologically based, nsibiri can be

learned with equal ease by adult speakers of any I-language including ⁄gbo and ”fikeven though it’s generally accepted to be of non-⁄gbo, non-”fik origin.28

It’s accordingly possible that the non-⁄gbo E-language of Abakuá cabildos, though

etymologically ”fik to a large extent, was not transmitted to Cuba directly by ”fik-

speakers alone, or at all. This conjecture still needs to be cross-checked by

comparative philology on both Atlantic shores, but meanwhile it has an interesting

consequence: missing diasporan ⁄gboisms would no longer count as a mysterious

deficit, but would be understandable as resulting from a mechanism which can be

2 4 6 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

called “negative” transmission: transfer of E-language material by speakers of a

distinct I-language. Some Afrocuban texts which are etymologically non-⁄gbo could

be Àr∂isms—referring to their immediate source—and also negative ⁄gboisms—

since non-⁄gbo material was transmitted by ⁄gbo speakers.

The revised picture is independently plausible for two reasons. (i) In Àr∂ as in

other so-called stateless polities, a key technique of power has exploited the non-

correspondence between I-languages (mother tongues) and E-languages (the codes

of ritual texts).29 (ii) “kpå codes were known by at least some captive ⁄gbo-

speakers: in Àr∂, “[e]ntry to the seven-tiered stages of full membership was open to

any adult male no matter their class or status” (Dókã & “kåji¥bÄ 1990, 77).30 It

follows that ”fik-medium ãkpå performance texts were available to some

transatlantic Àr∂ captives as a basis for neo-ethnic associations like the Afrocuban

Abakuá cabildos. Despite the paucity of ⁄gbo lexical material, these have been

labaled with the ⁄gbo subgroup name “(I)suama” (Cabrera 1958, 69), literally ⁄sØamÄ “the ⁄sØ of dispersion” (Àfiògbo 1986, 11; 1992a, 41), a term covering a large

share of the Àr∂ sector of influence in the southern ⁄gbo-speaking area.

A testable prediction of the foregoing is that Cuban ãkpå texts, despite

predominance of ”fik lexical material, should display ‘transfer’ effects from ⁄gbo-

speaking intermediaries, as whenever a second language is learned outside the critical

period. In principle the phenomena could be phonetic (altering ”fik pronunciation

in stereotypically ⁄gbo ways) or morphosyntactic (use of non-”fik word order;

leveling of ”fik person, number and aspect inflections). The differences may be

subtle, since ⁄gbo and ”fik are closely related (prosodically identical, in fact, cf.

Green 1949), and may be further masked by secondary transfers from Cuban

Spanish, but some should in principle be observed. Controlling for all these, the

hypothesis of negative ⁄gboisms implies that ⁄gbo-based departures from normal

”fik will be found in Afrocuban Abakuá no less than in the ritual speech of ãkpåassociations in bilingual communities like Àr∂.

Aspects of this scenario can be made more precise. Recognizing that comparison

of Cuban Abakuá texts with Àr∂ versions of ãkpå will need the help of culture-

bearing communities in southeastern Nigeria, the paper concludes with issues of

“secondary explanations” in consciousness (Boas 1911). Abakuá, as the hegemonic

ideology of an 18th-century diaspora, contrasts with orientalist beliefs in Middle

Eastern origins favored by literate 19th-and 20th-century ⁄gbo and ”fik-speakers,

now reinforced by North American Afrocentrist discourse. Before all that, I should

explain why creolization adds nothing to the Abakuá story.

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 4 7

IS A NYT HING NO T A C R EO L E?

The trouble with creolization as a theory is that it’s either unfalsifiable or already

falsified. Usually the notion is not presented explicitly enough to exclude any known

or possible cultural change, and even when it is, the facts don’t oblige. In Americanist

anthropology, the classic creolist broadside brims with earnest programmatics which,

apart from being observationally vague, are multiply-hedged:

Within the strict limits set by the conditions of slavery, African-Americans learned

to put a premium on innovation and individual creativity. …From the first, then,

the commitment to a new culture by African-Americans in a given place included

an expectation of continued dynamism, change, elaboration and creativity.[FN]

Some beliefs and rites have always served as a focus of conservatism, a badge of

fidelity to the African past. …Moreover, we recognize that many aspects of

African-American adaptiveness may themselves be in some important sense

African in origin. (Mintz & Price 1976, 51, 95)

Similar thoughts appear in the Amsterdam creole handbook:

[C]reole languages… exhibit an abrupt break in the course of their historical

development. …[They] develop as a result of ‘linguistic violence’ (and, as we shall

see, frequently social violence too). In other words, we have to reckon with a break

in the natural development of the language, the natural transmission of a language

from generation to generation. (Muysken & Smith 1995, 4)

The task, in both cases, is to distinguish “creativity” or “abruptness” from “natural”

historical scenarios in a non-circular way.

A reasonable way to define “Universal Creole Grammar” (Thompson 1961, 113) is

to list features that all and only creole languages possess, then derive them from some

characteristics of disrupted language transmission. Easier said than done: as the

theoretical stakes have increased, the alleged defining properties of creoles have

declined, from an unordered set of 12 constructions (Taylor 1971, 294), to 5 “key

areas of grammar” and 7 secondary ones (Bickerton 1981, 51, 72), to mere

“simplicity” itself defined as the absence of 3 morphological properties (McWhorter

1998, 809).31 The arbitrariness of these attempts is underlined by the fact that they

2 4 8 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

don’t even overlap; the futility of the exercise is foretold by its diminishing returns,

as the number of creole-specific traits approaches zero.32 At a descriptive level, to

the extent that the lists can be tested, they fail. Taylor’s net is too wide, catching

presumptive ‘non-creole’ languages like Yor∞bÄ (OyålÄr¸an 1982). Conversely,

stereotypic ‘creoles’ like Haitian elude McWhorter’s criteria (DeGraff 2001b).33

Admitting the impasse, the same page of the Amsterdam handbook continues:

What is clear is that creole languages are not in the slightest qualitatively

distinguishable from other spoken languages. …This means that before we can

claim a language to be a creole, we need to know something about its history,

either linguistic or social, and preferably both. (Muysken & Smith 1995, 4f.)

How to square the circle: if creoles are sociohistorically unusual, why aren’t they

grammatically unique? From distinct premises, DeGraff and Mufwene both argue

that this state of affairs is not contradictory, nor does it escape ordinary paths of

language change. In short, the facts don’t require any special theory of creolization.

DeGraff (1999b) holds that if creole language refers to anything, it’s E-language:

“externalized” or “extensional” language (Chomsky 1986, 20), an open corpus of

texts (utterances) including the kind of unsystematic primary data normally available

to infants during the critical period for language.34 This fits the first handbook quote

above. In line with the second quote, DeGraff finds that creole-ness does not name

any property of I-language: the hypothetical, “internalized” or “intensional” mental

representations that cause someone to speak a language fluently. The mixed result is

coherent: although E-language input is a necessary condition for language

development in infants (no particular human language is transmitted genetically),

it’s not a sufficient condition (major aspects of a fluent speaker’s competence can’t

be induced from E-language material).35

The preceding sentence may be intelligible to linguists, even those who reject the

I-language/E-language distinction, but others might like a little background. Contra

behaviorist psychology (Skinner 1957), naturalistic studies since Brown & Hanlon

(1970, 48) don’t find that infants’ ungrammatical utterances are corrected in a syste-

matic way, but even so, children reliably abandon large classes of sentences which

they once freely produced. The best known case is zero causative expressions like

Don’t giggle me (intended to mean ‘Don’t make me giggle’): these are much used by

English-speaking three-year olds (Bowerman 1982; 1988, 79), but occur in no adult

variety of English or indeed any known language.36 The question is why they get

filtered out in a few years if no one penalizes their use. Moreover, analogous phrases

like I broke the cup aren’t affected, at least not in English (Hale 1996).37 Conceivably,

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 4 9

children might infer a distinction between giggle and break from lived experience

(only animates giggle ; breaking can’t be spontaneous), but the distinction by itself

can’t make causative giggle unspeakable while sparing causative break: both

predicates are thinkable, so the change in performance depends in part on something

remote from the external world. Chomsky calls such structures, among others,

“Universal Grammar” (UG).38 The example shows that UG is a brain state which

constrains the use of individual vocabulary items and their morphological quirks, as

the latter are gradually picked up by a maturing mind (Borer 2003).

DeGraff’s point is that there’s no evidence UG treats ‘creole’ E-language specially.

The mix of contact jargons, varieties of French and Niger-Congo languages in the

colonial sugar economy of 17th-18th century Saint-Domingue conferred no unique

I-language properties on the subsequent Haitian language—called by its speakers

either Ayisyen or Kreyòl.39 In Chomskyan terms, the notion of “I-creole” is

undefined: “creoles are no more and no less than the result of extraordinary external

factors coupled with ordinary internal factors…” (DeGraff 1999b, 477). While

McWhorter (2001b) regards creoles as “young languages” compared to all the rest,

Chomskyans consider all human languages as, by definition, equally ‘young’: each

one is recreated, every generation, in infant brains.

McWhorter accuses DeGraff of “a veiled claim that no statement about human

language is valid unless couched in the Chomskyan paradigm” (2001b, 398), but

equally negative conclusions are reached by non-Chomskyan Mufwene:

[W]hat is called creolization in the linguistics literature does not correspond to any

particular structural process or combination thereof. …[C]reoles are far from

being a general structural type of language, although they form a special

sociohistorically defined group of vernaculars and share several features on the

family resemblance model. To be sure, similar social and linguistic developments

took place elsewhere and at other times, however the term creole was not used for

their outcomes there and then. Thus, what we have everywhere seems to be simple

evolutiuon of languages from one state to another under different ecological

conditions. (2001, 138)40

Despite adopting I-language/E-language terminology, Mufwene reinterprets this

distinction to hold between “idiolects” and “communal languages” respectively,

where the latter are defined as “ensembles of I-languages” and as presupposing the

existence of a “collective mind” (Mufwene 2001, 2). Chomskyan ontology, by

contrast, locates the grammar of any particular human language in an individual,

mature brain state. This discrepancy isn’t new: it recalls de Saussure’s successive

2 5 0 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

interpretations of langue and parole (Godel 1957; Hiersche 1972). Chomsky recalls

the de Saussure of 1906/07, who describes the systematic side of language (langue) as

individual, and the accidental side (parole) as social:

Tout ce qui est amené sur les lèvres par les besoins du discours, et par une

opération particulière, c’est la parole. Tout ce qui est contenu dans le cerveau de

l’individu, le depôt des formes entendues et pratiquées et de leur sens, c’est la

langue. (Godel 1957, 145). [Everything brought to the lips by the needs of discou-

rse, and by a particular activity, is parole. Everything contained in the brain of the

individual, the store of understood and used forms plus their meaning, is langue.]

Mufwene’s communal language is closer to how de Saussure defines langue in his

course of 1908/09:41

La langue est un ensemble de conventions adoptées par le corps social pour

permettre l’usage de la faculté du langage chez les individus. La parole est l’acte de

l’individu réalisant sa faculté au moyen de la convention social qui est la langue.

(Godel 1957, 66). [Langue is a set of conventions adopted by the social group per-

mitting the use of the language faculty by individual speakers. Parole is the act by

an individual realising his/her faculty via the social convention which is langue.]

Mufwene’s denial of a creole grammar type thus surpasses DeGraff’s, because it

even extends to E-language. This leads to a second difference: Mufwene’s analogy of

“communal language” with “biological species” (2001, 14), rather than with an

individual organism, causes him to reject the family tree (Stammbaum) model of

language transmission, allowing instead that a language may have “multiple parents”

(2001, 211 fn. 14). In sum, Mufwene’s model has no room either for abruptness in

language change, or for “hybridity” in linguistic inheritance. DeGraff by contrast is

“Stammbaumtheorie-friendly” (2003, 398) with the catch that what is inherited in

family trees is strictly an E-language base to which normal, discontinuous acquisition

processes apply. If for Chomskyans like DeGraff all human languages are equally

‘young’ (re-created in infant ontogeny), for Mufwene they’re all equally ‘old’

(inherited in group phylogeny). Both Bickerton and McWhorter, by contrast, divide

human languages with respect to ‘age’; that’s the only way to make the creole label

stick. But where is the evidence that allegedly ‘younger’ languages are special?42

If a list of creole languages can’t be compiled without peeking at speakers’ ethnic

backgrounds, then creolization is not just circular theory, it’s racial ideology

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 5 1

(Manfredi 1993, 43). The first two quotes in this section convey the creolist

obsession with ancestry: the belief that (cultural or linguistic) change is necessarily

more abrupt in situations of contact between distinct populations, than in

demographic tranquility. If this belief is simply wrong and its theoretical expression a

dead end, its persistence is still instructive. Literate elites worry about rapid

grassroots cultural change, especially when it’s not masked by the stability of ‘high’,

written forms of public memory. Such anxieties abounded in the mid-19th century

—when creole studies were born—because the engine of European nationalism was

the extension of literacy from clerics to a skilled industrial labor force (Gellner

1967).43 The last section returns to issues in the sociology of (self-)knowledge, but

first I should review available documentary evidence of E-language transmission.

CA L L M E CA R A B A L Í: C UB A N ÌGB O IS M S A S R IT UA L - P O L IT IC A L A L IA S

Summarizing so far: unless census tallies are radically revised to diminish ⁄gbopresence, there’s no I-language explanation for the scarcity of ⁄gbo words in

American communities stemming from the Middle Passage. Unless the gap reduces

to a coincidence of particular mislabelings on both sides of the ocean, an alternative

account is needed, and one is available which relies on political and literary dynamics

of E-language. The task is to develop, and eventually to test, such a story.

As Turner showed, good evidence for ethnic origins of transatlantic populations is

found in personal names. One source of such data comprises rosters of captives

rescued at sea at the end of legal slave trade, a time coinciding with the peak of the

Bight of Biafra sector (Eltis 2001, 45) as well as with “the most intense period of Àr∂commercial expansion” (Ÿjå©ma & Újó®kµ 1992, 300). Of 213 named individuals

found on the ship Amélie, loaded at fiˇbanú (“Bonny”) and intercepted in Martinique

in 1822 (Thésée 1986, 137f.), most are unmistakeably ⁄gbo even in French errorist

transcription.44 Similarly,

…[o]f the slaves on four ships from Bonny captured by the British patrol in 1821,

fully 74 per cent were registered in Sierra Leone as ‘Ebo’ or ‘Heboo’ (Igbo) and 20

per cent as Calabar (Efik-speaking). As in the case of the captured ships from Old

Calabar, the method by which the registrars established who was an Igbo [speaker]

would have inflated the percentage somewhat by including individuals of smaller

groups who also understood Igbo. (Northrup 2000, 14 citing 1978, 60-62, 231)

2 5 2 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

Reviewing a larger set of such archives, Nw£kãjò concludes that

…[w]hile the estimates of eighty percent and seventy-five percent for the ⁄gboproportion of Biafra’s export captives given respectively by Chambers and ·rójóare too high, Northrup’s sixty percent estimate seems too low. (2000, 641)

Ethnic labels are referentially more ambiguous than personal names, but for

reconstructed identification their redundancy (signal-to-noise ratio) is potentially

greater because the set of named political units is smaller than the set of named

individuals. In Cuba, Cabrera (1988, 7) lists two dozen autonyms of ⁄gbo subgroups,

using Spanish spelling of Cuban pronunciations. These are given below in italics. By

inspection, all but two unambiguously match precolonial ⁄gbo-speaking ‘clans’

(lineage federations) and ethnic subregions (cf. Àn™kÄ 1979; ·rójó 1999). The

identifications follow, with two unknown cases left blank:

Abaya Àgbaaja45 Ika fikÄAro Àr∂ (“Aro”) Ikueri ⁄kwãre (“Ikwerri”)

Oyofia Âha©fyÄ (“Ohaffia”) Isu ⁄sØOyosara ÂhÄ™zara Isuachi ⁄sØ©chúOtansa ÂtÄæcha Ndoki Òd©kú (“Ndokki”)

Eda ÷dˇhÅ (“Adda”) Nku ÒkumåIshielu ŸsielØ Koba [ ]

Eché ”chóå (“Etche”) Onicha Ânúcha (“Onitsha”)

Asiana [ ] Oka ‰ka (“Awka”)

Iye Ÿhå Ututu Átut∞46

Iyiesa ⁄hitãnÅsa Orata ÎraÅta (“Oratta”)

Ikuo fikw© Oru ‡ru

At the most inclusive level of nomenclature, the ⁄gbo category itself figures but

marginally in Cuban trade records (Bergad & al. 1995), most ⁄gbo speakers having

been submerged in other designations, especially Carabalí:

Ibó es un importante pueblo casi en la desembocadura del Niger. Suenan poco en

Cuba sus nativos, seguramente por confundirse algunos con los lucumís y con los

yorubas, y otros con los carabalís. En la Habana hubo un cabildo carabalí

Ibó.…[L]os ibós entrasen en Cuba como carabalís. (Ortíz 1924, 252, 2) [⁄gbo is a

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 5 3

big population almost at the mouth of the River Niger. In Cuba one hears little

about its natives, certainly because some were mixed in with Lucumís and Yor∞bÄs,and others with Carabalís. In Havana there was a cabildo called Carabalí Ibó.

…The ⁄gbos entered Cuba as Carabalís.]

In Africa the reverse distortion occured, with ⁄gbo overlapping its neighbors:47

Its use by Europeans in the form Heebo or Ibo appears early in the slave trade to

refer to any ⁄[g]bo-speaking groups. It was also applied at first to the Ibibio who

were later distinguished as “Kwa Ibo” after the principal river of their country.

(Forde & Jones 1950, 9)

This asymmetry between the two ends of the trade makes ⁄gbo under-labeling on

the output side even more significant. As argued by Northrup (2000), it can be

interpreted in two ways. It may, on the one hand, simply show that older, literal

denotations of ⁄gbo differed from its modern reference as an ethnonym (a proper

name).48 But other remarks by Afrocubans are more consistent with a second

possibility: that submersion of ⁄gbo in “Carabali” was not intrinsic but errorist, since

at least some culture bearers possessed a good understanding of the ethnic picture:

Carabalí isuama, —o suama. De estos vinieron muchos. …Mi abuelo decía que

saltando una tierra los ibó estaban en el Calabar: son y no son carabalís (Cabrera

1958, 69, 71). [Isuama, or Suama, Calabarians. Many of these came. …My

grandfather said that the ⁄gbos were separated from Calabar by one intervening

territory: they are, and aren’t, Carabalís.]

The ambivalence of the preceding sentence also applies to the ⁄gbo-speaking

community of Àr∂, supporting the idea that the latter was involved in the American

transmission of “Carabali” (as in ”fik) cultural material such as ãkpå.

Quite apart from its (mis)use with respect to ⁄gbo speakers, use of the name Old

Calabar to refer to the slaving port at the mouth of the “Cross” river is a masterpiece

of errorism all by itself:49

The words Calabar or Old Calabar are not applied to the Cross River till the Dutch

maps of the seventeenth cantury. The town of Calabar is known to the natives as

Efuk (Efik), and they regard the word Calabar as of European origin. What in all

probability actually happened was that the word was taken from the (New)

2 5 4 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

Calabar River which was so named from the town of the Kalabari who lived on

it… Through some error this name was applied to the Cross River estuary which

was finally called “old” Calabar to distinguish it… (Talbot 1926, 183f.)

The name Calabar… is not shown on fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Spanish and

Portuguese maps, but first appears on Dutch maps of the seventeenth century.

…The word Calabar is not of Efik origin; it is believed to have been first applied to

the New Calabar River, farther to the west, so-called from the villages of the

Kalabari Ijaw who lived along its banks. Through error the name came to be used

for the Cross River estuary area, which in turn was later called ‘Old’ Calabar to

distinguish it from ‘New’ Calabar, a town situated on the Niger River near Bonny,

and now known as Degema. (Simmons 1956a, 4)

Beyond simple ignorance, the notion may have been suggested by oral traditions in

the eastern delta, which Europeans had reached long before:

When the Dutch and English became interested in slaves from these rivers they

distinguished three principal trading states each on its own river of the same

name. These were Calbaria or New Calabar (Kalabari), Bonny and Old Calabar.

The last referred to the Efik state and one can only guess how this name came to

be applied to it. The Efik people have always dissociated themselves from the

name, which they say they received from the Europeans, and have acknowledged

no connections with the Kalabari. Kalabari traditions are complicated by the fact

that Koroye, the founder of one of the Kalabari wards, is said to have come “from

old Calabar”. This is probably a modern emendation. It was not until the end of

the nineteenth century that the Efiks came into contact with the Eastern Delta

states. (1963, 20f., cf. 1989, 26)

The present ‘authorised tradition’ of the Kalabari attributes the establishment of

the overseas slave trade to [king] Amakiri, and the contemporary traditions of the

former Korome ward of Kalabari associate it with their founder Opu-Koro-ye…

who came ‘from Efik’… [T]hough we can never prove it, we may suggest that the

European attribution of the name Old Calabar to the Efik people could be a

reflection of the Korome myth of origin. It was the place which the Opukoroye

line of Kalabari kings claimed as their original home. (1965, 155f., 159)

The ambiguity of Cuban Carabali may thus have been compounded when several

African ports fell within Western errorist usage of “Calabar”, “New” or “Old”.

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 5 5

At the limit of uncertainty is the Cuban term Abakuá. Thompson (1983, 298 fn 8)

finds an etymology in an ethnic term known to ”fik speakers:

[T]he neighboring village, Big Qua Town, whose inhabitants are culturally related

to the Ejagham Ekoi… are called abakpa by the Efik. (Simmons 1956b, 66).50

Cook (1969, 168; 1985, 3 fn. 4) cites this potential source as low throughout (Ãbakpain the orthography used here), which could easily emerge in Cuban Spanish as final

stress, in contrast to the initial stress of Cuban ecue continuing the high-low prosody

of ”fik ãkpå. All the vowels match; as for consonants, Cuban [kw] (spelled ku or cu)

is the regular treatment of African [kp], as in Cuban ecue continuing original ãkpå.51

Semantically, the correspondence is less clear. Why should the ”fik cult name

ãkpå be replaced in Cuba with the name of ”fik’s ethnic neighbor, even if the latter is

considered to be ãkpå’s original source? The question gains force from the fact that

ãkpå itself persisted in Cuba (as ecu e). There are two general possibilities. (i) The

Cuban usage of Abakuá began in Africa but either subsequently died out there

without appearing in documents, or else was veiled from outsiders by errorism or

secrecy. (ii) It’s a Cuban innovation, perhaps based on the view reported by Jones:

The Egbo [ãkpå] society of Old Calabar [”fik] was derived from the neighbouring

Qua who said they brought it with them from their Ekoi homeland” (1956, 136).52

This quote yields four errorist hits, two of which (emended by me in square

brackets) were discussed above. The other two need comment. “Big Qua Town” is

known in ”fik as ÃkwÄÄ Oby§ Abakpa (literally ‘the big town of the Ãbakpas’) and

in its own language as “Akin Aen” (Imona 1996, 26). Noah speaks of “the Akin (the

present Qua people)” (1980, 64). Cook renders Akin phonetically as [çKóòn], where

the upper case K is presumably ejective, and describes it as

mutually intelligible with Ejagham, a large language spoken to the northeast of

Calabar. Ekin, Ejagham and Southern Etung (Crabb’s language H; Crabb, 1965:5,

9) can be regarded as forming a dialect cluster. (1985, 3 fn. 4)

Cook also corrects the spelling “Qua” (sometimes “Aqua”, cf. Akak 1983, 380, or

“Akwa”, cf. Aye 1994, 16), transcribing it as [kØ™] (1985, 3). Akak independently

confirms this by referring to “Qua, Kwa or Kwo” (1995, 12).53

2 5 6 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

Even though the names written Qua [= kØ™] and Akpa [= Åkpa] are linguistically

distinct (Akak 1983, 378), they can be co-referent, as when Akak speaks of “Akpas

alias Quas” (1995, 28), echoing a 1668 description quoted by Kingsley:54

The original inhabitants of the district now occupied by the Old Calabar people

are the Akpas whom the Calabarese drove out and to a large extent afterwards

absorbed. This immigration of the Calabarese is said to have taken place a little

over a hundred and fifty years ago. (1899, 553)

The equivalence between Ãkpa and Ãbakpa could be literal, if the -ba- can be

separated as a plural, human nounclass marker in Benue-Kwa languages (B. Connell

pers. comm.). The synonymy also fits Talbot’s take on ”fik origins:

c. 1670. Some of the Ibibio chiefs from Creek Town [Obio Oko], finding

themselves cut off from the European traders by their kin at Obutong [Old

Town], moved to the site now called Duke Town (Calabar), some two miles to the

south… They procured the land from the Kwa (Ekoi) who owned the country,

and their town was at first called Akwa Akpa [Big Qua,] or sometimes New Town,

to distinguish it from Obutong. (1926, 185)

I suggest that “Qua” [= KØ™], “Akin” [= çKóòn] and “Ekoi” are all cognate.

“Ekoi” is an old spelling of a term for “the Ejagham of Cameroun” (Crabb 1965, 11),

apparently borrowed by Europeans from ”fik speakers and canonised in the

literature in adjectival form “Ekoid” (Mansfield 1908; Talbot 1912). Crabb (1965, 69)

reports variants of the lexical item for ‘forest’ in the “Ekoid” language group:

form location

[å-k£k£i] Ekparabong

[å-kØï] Bendeghe-Northern Etung

[å-kØi] Northern Etung

[å-kØa] Southern Etung

[å-kØn…] Efutop

[å-kón…] Nde55

In this list, it jumps off the page that the first variant is phonetically similar to “Ekoi”,

the fourth to [KØ™] and the last to [çKóòn]. (Independently, “Qua” belongs to the

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 5 7

same subgroup as Etung.) It wouldn’t be the first time that the word for ‘bush’

provided the basis for ethnic nomenclature.56

Ãkpa and Ãbakpa were also used outside “Calabar”; they named a group who

intervened during the 17th century invasion of ⁄bibio-speaking Àr∂ by ⁄sØamÄ⁄gbo-speakers. That the item “Akankpa” is connected, is suggested in this retelling:

The raids for slaves were linked to powerful merchant princes such as Akuma

Nnubi of Akankpa, belonging to the Ekoi (Okonyong) ethnic group. …[A]rrival

of yet another ethnic group, the Akpa or the Ekoi, whose interests were mercanti-

list …coincided with the …conflict referred to in tradition as the Ibibio war.

…[D]ecisive battles were fought after the intervention of the Akpa, a completely

different set of migrants from the Akpa area. …The Akpa of course retained their

connection with their homeland. This was ensured by the sacred symbols of

ancestral authority given to them by their chief at Akankpa, their home base. …In

Arochukwu, these sacred relics were known as otusi and consisted of various

elaborately carved ivory figures of the leopard, hunting dogs and elephant tusks.

…[T]he relatively peaceful period following the imposition of Akpa ascendancy

saw an influx of new migrants: specialists of various descriptions, craftsmen,

refugees from neighboring settlements and slaves. …The well developed social and

political system brought in by them and built around the otusi, the evolving

system of patron/client relationship with its associated system of surplus

extraction and accumulation through tributes and homage as well as the Ekpe

club, enabled Akuma the Akpa king to organize the old and new settlements in

Arochukwu into a unified state. …The people east of the Cross River are said to

have called themselves Akpa and the name ‘Ekoi’ was originally applied to them by

the Efiks. There are a few villages on the middle section of the Cross River called

Akpa and all ‘foreign’ settlements in Ogoja province on the River banks are known

as Abakpa. The port of Calabar was locally known as Atakpa. …The Abakwango-

Hausa speaking [people] who lived and intermingled with the Jukuns for several

centuries are known to the Jukun as Bakpa or Abakpa. The people who lived in the

vicinity of the coast before the Efiks arrived from the interior and with whom they

intermarried were called Kwa, Aka and Akpa. (Dókã & “kåji¥bÄ 1990, 47-49)

A specific link between the ãkpå institution and the term “Abakpa” at Àr∂ can be

inferred from one more detail:

The introduction of the Ekpe club in Arochukwu is attributed to one of Akuma’s

followers, Otu Ono, whom he commissioned to bring in the secrets from his natal

home in Akankpa, east of the Cross River. (Dókã & “kåji¥bÄ 1990, 77)

2 5 8 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

Absent any example of “Abakpa” applied to the ãkpå institution by ”fik-speakers in

“Calabar”, and with the only known such usage restricted to Àr∂, this particular

usage of Abakuá in Cuba is closer to the latter.57

If the foregoing is true, Abakuá E-language should show other Àr∂ features.

Scanning through the largest Abakuá anthology (Cabrera 1988), I found ⁄gbo lexical

content in nine entries, seven of which are easily matched in the ⁄gbo dictionary.

Five simple lexical items occur:

Lebé. Mirar (p. 325). låbã ‘begin to look, continue looking’ (cf. Ÿgwå 1999, 365)

Ñene. Mujer (p. 429). £nyeånye ‘woman’ (Ÿgwå 1999, 611)58

Okuko ibana unen. Gallina (p. 455). ™kµk™ ‘domestic fowl, hen’ (Ÿgwå 1999, 662),

plus ”fik Ønín ‘chicken’

Umon. Tribu (p. 507). µm∂ ‘children, descendants’ (Ÿgwå 1999, 812)

Yeó. Dinero (p. 527). ãgo ‘money, cowrie’ (Ÿgwå 1999, 145)

Cabrera also gives two formulaically repeated sentences, whose presence in the

corpus is obviously due to ritual use:

Anamabó, anamabó. Se dice al purificar al cofrade con un mazo de hierbas (p. 52).

[Said while cleaning a ritual brother with a sprig of herbs]

ÀnÅ m abµ, ÄnÅ m abµ. ‘I am spattering [liquid]’. (cf. Ÿgwå 1999, 102, 826)

Anameró, anameró. Arrancando (las plumas de un ave) (p. 53). [Plucking out the

feathers of a bird]

ÀnÅ m er£, ÄnÅ m er£. ‘I am plucking out [feathers]’. (cf. Ÿgwå 1999, 175, 729)

The remaining two lexical ⁄gbo-isms contain variants of a famous proper name,

followed by various epithets which I conjecturally identify in the ⁄gbo glosses:

Choko guanabia. Voz misteriosa que suena en el rincón del Butame [santuario]. El

sonido de Ekue (p. 135). [Mysterious voice that sounds in the corner of the

sanctuary. The sound of Ekue. ]

ChØku ºgbe © nÅ-abiÄ ‘ChØkwu the visitor’ (cf. “ChØkwu the great deity of the

strangers”, NwÄ™ga 1984, 60, 72)

Chukuabia eriélu. Santísimo, en el cielo y en la tierra (p. 135). [Holiest in heaven

and earth]

ChØku abúaÅmÄ rù elØ ‘God the stranger who is in the sky’59

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 5 9

Both citations are significant because, before the term ChØk(w)u was neologistically

borrowed by catechists into the written language in a monotheistic sense (Ãchebã1975; “chårØ£ 1979; NwÄ™ga 1984, 28), it named the Àr∂ oracle (among others

perhaps) giving rise to expressions like Îm∂ ChØkwu for “Arochukwu” citizens.

Clarke’s name for the Àr∂ oracle includes the epithet “Obyama” (1848, 73), precisely

as in the Cuban source. NwÄ™ga’s summary is definitive:

The biggest oracle which pervaded ⁄gboland from the 17th century was the Ibini

Ukpabi of the Àr∂. Ibini Ukpabi was not the god of the Àr∂. When the Àr∂ speak

of god they speak of chó and Âbasú. It is important to make this distinction. When

however the Àr∂ went into the rest of ⁄gboland to trade in slaves, they took with

them, both for protection and as an additional business, the reputation of their

Chó-Ukwu (big chó) thereby elevating Ibini Ukpabi to the status of the last arbiter,

the god beyond which there could be no surer answer to problems. Àr∂ agents all

over ⁄gboland and beyond advised individuals and groups among whom they

lived to go to “to consult ChØkwu” whenever a case went beyond local solution. A

strong chain of information gathering was created, mysteries were invented

around the shrine, death and slavery were visited on guilty persons, and generally

going “to consult ChØkwu” in Àr∂chØkwu became the highest act of the judicial

process and of other problems and situations that required ultimate and drastic

solution. (1984, 36)60

A related, potential Àr∂-ism, also suggested by NwÄ™ga’s philology, is monotheistic

use of the ”fik name Abasi, sans epithet (e.g. Cabrera 1988, 18):

Rev. Udo Odiong… explains that “Abasi is a general name for all gods in

⁄bibioland.” When the ⁄bibio want to refer to the Great God they use a qualifier:

“Thus Abasi Ibom is the God whose greatness, ability etc. are beyond human

knowledge.” …It would appear that terminologically the same relationship exists

between Abasi Ibom and ChØkwu, both being made up of the real original concept

(Abasi and Chó, plus a descriptive epithet indicating immensity. …It would also

appear that the Àr∂ Âbasù dù n’elØ represents an incomplete and therefore faulty

transfer of concept. (Nwęga 1984, 57)

One more possible Àr∂-influence in Abakuá, suggested by C. ÁchåchØkwu(pers. comm.), is not lexical but phonetic: the distribution of r and l in Cuban

Carabalí compared to ‹z¸®n Kalaˇbari. The change is usually described as metathesis,

but a more plausible alternative is at hand:

2 6 0 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

A rolled r occurs in the [Àr∂] language, but this sound is replaced in certain

words by another consonant which is a mixture of r and l. This sound, common in

many African languages, is difficult to acquire; our native did not like it if it

resembled l too much. It occurs to the exclusion of r in the neighborhood of [i]and [ú], and occasionally with [e] and u ; with other vowels [e.g. with a], r is used.”

(Adams & Ward 1929, 66)

Applied to a loanword of the form […la…ri…], the rule automatically returns the

output […ra…li…], precisely as in the Cuban pronunciation. On the far side of the

ocean, 18th century Oldendorp (cited by Hair 1967, 72 fn 14) transcribed the term

“Karabari” (1777/2000, 458), possibly illustrating the abovementioned difficulty to

acquire a “consonant which is a mixture of r and l.”61

CA L L M E HEB R EW : NA R C IS S IS M V ER S US NO S T A L GIA

The preceding section culled secondary support for the neo-Herskovits idea that

some of the ‘missing’ linguistic heritage of ⁄gbo speakers in the Americas survives

‘negatively’ in Cuban Abakuá texts which are etymologically ”fik. To test this with

primary data means comparing ãkpå texts from Cuba and Àr∂ , with ”fikcounterparts as a control. In such an experiment, a potential methodological pitfall

on the Nigerian side emerged at the 2003 African diaspora conference in Chicago,

when ⁄gbo-speaking migrants intervened in the discussion of Africanisms to present

a claim of non-African, specifically Hebrew or Jewish, origin for themselves.

Orientalism is epidemic in Nigeria and there’s no cheap vaccine. Yor∞bÄ church-

men claim “Northern Egyptian” ancestry (Lucas 1948, 353; cf. Od∞Øyoyå 1971;

Wescott 1964), ”fik historians recall “migration from Palestine through Sudan”

(QCCA 2003, 26; cf. Hart 1964; Aye 1967) and the Chicago ⁄gbo spokesman glossed

the ⁄gbo phrase Äka ™ha (‘hand of the people’) as the Hebrew word for priest,

reprising Hyman Kaplan’s Yiddification of the 16th U.S. President as “Abram

Lincohen” (Ross 1937, 5). Dismiss these tales as blowback, agitprop or malaprop, but

they still matter, for two reasons. (i) Feeding back from historiography into oral

tradition, they add noise to texts collected from living Nigerians. (ii) They’re grist for

an information-theoretic analysis of actual migrations and ideological change.

Factor (i) is well known. Echoing abolitionists like Equiano (1789), missionaries

styled the ⁄gbo as a “lost tribe of Israel” (Basden 1938, 411-23; ‰gbÅlµ 1981, 7;

“kåãchó 1972). Theological subtext: these troublesome pagans are monotheists under

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 6 1

the skin (in the genes), but along the way from the Upper Nile to the Lower Niger,

skydaddy ChØkwu Jehovah was rudely “elbowed into the background by the cult of

the spirits and ancestors” (Ãrùøze 1970, 11).62 Colonial officials jumped on the

Hamitic bandwagon after ⁄gbo- and ⁄bibio-speaking women deposed British-

appointed chiefs in 1929 (Gailey 1970; Àfiògbo 1972). Political agenda: if ChØkwucan be rehabilitated as Osiris’ long-lost cousin, we can repair hasty regime changes in

Úri and Àr∂ and groom southeastern proxies to match Frederick Lugard’s beloved

Fulani emirs (Jeffreys 1935; cf. Seligman 1930, Àfiògbo 1975, 1981a). Braiding both

strands into a civil creed, Republic of Biafra publicists compared the ⁄gbo to “the

Jews of old” (·jØkwu 1969, 221) complete with their own bearded, military Moses;

described anti-⁄gbo riots as an antisemitic Cossack pogróm (locally pronounced

prógram); and called the attritional Civil War a case of genocide.

The orientalist fancy that the word ⁄gbo is a “corruption of the word Hebrew”

(Àfiògbo 1981c, 6; cf. Ilogu 1957, 116; ·rójó 1994, 26) resonates with ⁄gbo-speaking

literates because

…most educated ⁄gbo have seen their historical vicissitudes in this century as

paralleling only those of the Jews since the days of the exodus. …[T]his

widespread, though probably unhistorical, ideological feeling of oneness with the

Jews, which as we have seen goes back to the ex-slave boy Equiano in the

eighteenth century, provides some clue to understanding of ⁄gbo psychology,

motivation and drive. (Àfiògbo 1981b: 182)

In other words, the exodus motif lives in ⁄gbo consciousness because it echoes real

displacement (dimension ii). 19th century European nationalists embraced the

technical role of standard languages (Gellner 1967). In West Africa by contrast,

where the economic game was not industry but trade, indigenous standardization

deployed not secular literacy but decentralized, cultic texts. Local differences became

entrenched. The Bight of Benin wove threads of “double nationality” in multilingual

communities joining §rò…Å and vodun (YÄò 2001). The Bight of Biafra had the “ãkpåpolity” (Ruel 1969, 255) with its nonverbal nsibiri passport, multilingual ritual

speech and multi-ethnic lineage federations (Àfiògbo 1981a, 189f.). By the early 20th

century, industrial Europe had toppled all the autonomous West African regional

exchange systems, and oral, polytheistic lineages were subdued, if not entirely

replaced, by Sunday-Sunday monotheism and centralized states run by local literates.

West Africans received these revolutions in diverse ways, broadly following the

respective cognitive styles formed in the régimes of indigenous political economy. As

a first approximation of aggregate cultural response, one can distinguish ⁄gbo

2 6 2 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

narcissism from Yor∞bÄ nostalgia. Peel fluently evokes the nationalist nostalgia of

19th century texts like Samuel Johnson’s History of the Yor∞bÄs. Accompanying his

parents (rescued slaves and first generation churchgoers) in 1858, Johnson returned

from Sierra Leone to Nigeria where, in Peel’s sympathetic prose, he

…realized that his homeland needed to be re-imagined and re-configured for him

to be truly at home there. The memory of Abó©dØn’s vanished Ây© had to be

connected to the new, extended category of “Yor∞bÄ” introduced by the C[hurch]

M[issionary] S[ociety], and Christianity needed somehow to be integrated into its

history. (2000, 305)

Peel goes on to identify Johnson’s History with the mid-19th century’s ruling

literary genre, Romance: a blend of christian emotions reprising the New Testament

narrative of pathos, described by White (1973) as a “drama of self-identification”

with a plot of “redemption” (2000, 305).63 Johnson’s History never had an ⁄gbocounterpart, and in the absence of an antiquarian written charter, the ⁄gbo have

been described as “receptive to change.” In the classic statement of this culture-and-

personality conundrum, Herskovits’ student Ottenberg wonders

…whether the emphasis on individual achievement, alternative choices and other

features which facilitate culture change developed out of the slave trade or not.

(1959, 142)

As if in answer, a Haitian proverb declares Ibo pann kòr a yo ‘⁄gbos hang themselves’

(in captivity) and the “Ebo Landing” story recalls collective suicidal rebellion.64

Meanwhile back in Nigeria, the Yor∞bÄ have possessed the only stable ethnic

political party: the Awoist movement called at different times Action Group, Unity

Party of Nigeria or Alliance for Democracy . The ⁄gbo by contrast, having lost a

secession war, are reduced to the status of first-among-minorities (Coleman 1958,

350f.; Dudley 1978; „m®ruyi 2001, 287). The leading historian of Nigerian elites

traces this difference to the relative involvement of the diaspora of emancipated SÅr£(Sierraleonean) ‘recaptives’ from the two ethnolinguistic communities:

[O]nly a part of one ethnic group, the Yor∞bÄ, in the territory that was to be

called Nigeria countenanced the return of the SÅr£ in the nineteenth century.

…Why did SÅr£ from other ethnic groups in Nigeria, who were in large numbers

in [the] Sierra Leone colony, not imitate the Yor∞bÄ? First the evidence is strong

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 6 3

that nostalgia was strongest among the AkØ (as the Yor∞bÄ were known in Sierra

Leone)… In contrast were the ⁄gbo, the next largest ethnic group in Sierra

Leone… The Pratts and Hortons (prominent ⁄gbo) led no return-to-the-

fatherland movement, J.A.B. Horton making only a defective mental excursion to

⁄gboland. …Second, the Yor∞bÄ had the advantage of the British occupation of

Lagos which non-◊gbÄ SÅr£ seized to intrude into Lagos. There by far the

majority of them stayed permanently under British protection because they feared

that if they returned to their places of birth in the interior, they would be

reconverted to slaves for export. …In no other part of Nigeria was there a British

enclave like Lagos where the SÅr£ could move near to their ethnic groups. Hence

the failure of the reconnoitering visit to Old Calabar by some ⁄gbo who dare[d]

not move into ⁄gboland. It was only to Old Calabar and Fernando Po that many

of them returned, but only in a very tiny number. ⁄gboland was entirely sealed to

outsiders, including the SÅr£ ⁄gbo. On the Niger where mission stations and

commercial stations were manned mainly by non-⁄gbo SÅr£, the few ⁄gbomission agents lacked the temerity to venture into the interior. …The early

emergence of the educated elite among the Yor∞bÄ gave the latter more than an

ordinary lead in the matter of Western-style education over other ethnic groups in

the country, a fact destined to inflame inter-ethnic rivalry in the twentieth century

along directions not always healthy. (ÃyÄndãlã 1974, 11-13)

The contrast deepens in the post-independence diaspora, where the ⁄gbocommunity defines itself genetically, while a corresponding Yor∞bÄ membership

statement is entirely cultural in orientation:

Any persons or groups of persons or people who have Igbo blood and genes in

them in any part of the world, no matter under what circumstances they left

Igboland/Biafraland, is Igbo and is therefore part and parcel of the Igbo race, Igbo

heritage, and Igbo Nation. <http://www.biafraland.com/Ibo%20Landings.htm>65

A Yor∞bÄ is anyone that subscribes to the Yor∞bÄ culture traditions and way of

life. Anybody that has hereditary links to that Old Yor∞bÄ kingdoms. You could

live anywhere in the world or identify with any Nationality, but if you have a

Yor∞bÄ name, practice Yor∞bÄ customs or even naturalize by adopting the

Yor∞bÄ way of Life then you are Yor∞bÄ and can contribute to this forum.

<http://www.nubacom.com/21CenturyYoruba/21stCenturyYoruba.html>

AbóΩb©lÄ & Miller (1997) observe the boost which Yor∞bÄ nationalism has

drawn, since the 1970’s, from Yor∞bÄ cultural survivals in the diaspora of the 18th

2 6 4 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

and 19th centuries—a point repeated at the Chicago conference by the Yor∞bÄcommunity representatives. By contrast, I’ve never heard Abakuá mentioned in an

⁄gbo ethnic forum. Why not? In my observation at the conference, the Nigerian

Yor∞bÄs couldn’t parse the Cuban Lukumí texts beyond a few readily intelligible

proper names (¯Ång£, ·gØn…). More plausibly the two styles of diaspora differ,

not in literal linguistic knowledge, but on the level of political metarepresentations of

language, taking off from the very different codifications of Lukumí and Abakuá

—both as collections of texts and as political lingue franche at the time of dispersion.

By now, this old contrast has produced, and been reinforced by, distinct investments

in literate intellectual capital and in literary styles through which these investments

are respectively consumed. The greatest “⁄gbo novel” (in the phrase of “mãny®nµ1978) is written in English, is entitled Things Fall Apart (Ãchebã 1958) and has been

translated not into ⁄gbo but into Yor∞bÄ (·gØnyêmó 2000).66

Thus there are many independent reasons to say that existing patterns of linguistic

Africanisms in the Americas—as well as of diaspora consciousness—depend, as a

historical matter, less on raw demography than widely believed, and more on pre-

existing political institutions. This paper has made a preliminary case that a share of

the observed outcomes is due to the intervening factor of E-language transmission

—specifically to institutionalized uses of ritual lingue franche in diaspora. Being a

properly political matter, and not a force of human nature, the E-language variable

has a non-uniform effect on distinct populations, depending on long-term ecological

and economic relationships, among other boundary conditions. Like the other big

Middle Passage populations, captive ⁄gbo-speakers left little trace on I-languages

(mother tongues) in the Western Hemisphere, but unlike the other big groups they

also failed to transmit an appreciable amount of their ‘own’ E-language. A simple

explanation of the latter, ⁄gbo-specific outcome is that the most relevant lingua

franca, namely that of the hegemonic ãkpå institution, was lexically non-⁄gbo.

Conversely, a circumstantial case has been constructed, from hints in the standard

historical literature, that ⁄gbo-speakers were the main actors responsible for the

massive presence of ”fik-derived ãkpå ritual terminology in Cuban Abakuá.

This hypothesis is open to disproof by comparing ”fik ãkpå and Cuban Abakuá

performances, respectively, with ãkpå material used by ⁄gbo-speakers in the former

Àr∂ sphere of influence. Any nonrandom similarities of the last two, as against the

first, would confirm the line of reasoning presented here. What remains is the work

and pleasure of establishing and justaposing these texts.

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 6 5

NO T ES

Based on talks at the Conference on Recreating Africa in the Americas through Rhythms andRituals, Center for the Black Diaspora, DePaul University, Chicago, 5 April 2003, and at theWalter Rodney African Studies Seminar, Boston University, 22 March 2004. Correspondence tomanfredi@bu.edu. Thanks to Prof. S. Mufwene for his remarks in Chicago; to the Afrocubanensemble Omi Odara led by R. Díaz for their performances there; to students in my Spring2003 class “Language & Ethnicity” at Boston College; and to Dr. I. Miller for keeping me in hisresearch community since the 1996 African diaspora conference at SUNY Binghamton. Thepresent writup draws on discussions over the years with P. Muysken, ’S. OyålÄr¸an, M.Warner-Lewis and the late D. NwÄ™ga , and on recent exchanges with B. Connell, M. DeGraff,E. “zå, U. Nw£kãjò, O. Onyile, U. Röschenthaler, A. Schwegler and J. Thornton. J. Cutlerand I. Miller helped edit the first draft. Some of my conclusions converge with those reached byNorthrup (2000) from partly different premises. My paradigm is Prof. M. ‰nw¥ejó®gw∂’s1980 analysis of the Úri diaspora, integrating archaeology, ecology, economics, demography,linguistics, oral and written history with political and symbolic anthropology. This paper isdedicated to my revered sponsor and teacher the late “‰núkÅra” ÚkÄma ‰kpanú , ”zóUkwu, Kp£ghirikp£, ÷h¥gb§ (1911-2004). J™©kwa PÅpÄ, û hµ mÄú?

Transcription. So far as knowledge permits, and excepting some items in quotes or brackets,non-English forms are cited in standard orthography, marking lexically contrastive pitch. InYor∞bÄ [MLH], a ‘3 tone’ language with minor accentual effects (BÄΩgb£…ã 1966), eachsyllable is individually marked except that M is marked only on nasals. ⁄gbo [LL] and ”fik[LL], as trochaic, ‘2-tone plus downstep’ languages, are better suited to an accentual notationused by Christaller, Swift, Welmers and NwÄchukwu , marking just the first of each sequenceof syllables sharing a pitch level. Thus, in those languages, every unmarked syllable has the levelof the preceding mark; every high (acute) mark is interpreted as downstepped with respect tothe preceding one; and downstep is automatic if a low (grave) mark intervenes. Some ⁄gbo and”fik linguists use a ⁄bÅdÅn-style, syllable-by-syllable approach, leaving high always unmarkedand marking every low, but the presence of systematic downstep juncture in these languagesthen demands a special symbol. All known options—macron, vertical line, raised exclamationpoint, full stop—being impractical, downstep is most often ignored or mismarked

1. The precise phonetics of the word nsibiri/nsibidi /nchibiri are unknown to me. Some actualvariation, as opposed to pure errorism, is likely with respect to the consonants, thoughprobably not for the tone pattern, whatever it is.

2. <http://hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/6.htm#_Toc57442281>. See also Fisk & Goodman(2003), <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2788569.stm> and the following descriptionof the CBU-75 Sadeye:

a cluster bomb that contains 1800 one-pound bomblets, each containing 0.7 pounds of TNTwith 700 razor-sharp steel shards imbedded in it, lethal up to 40 feet. These are scatteredover an area equivalent to 157 football fields; presumably nothing—military, civilian, old,young, male, female—survives within this space. Many of the bomblets fail to go off andbecome landmines, the perfect random killer. (Lummis et al. 2003)

3. Even if not easily traceable as to origin, African archaisms in this hemisphere are rightlycalled survivals—facts whose impressive endurance underlines the brutality of genocide. This issurely why, as the Boston percussionist Nurudafina Pili Abena has often said, Afroamericanmusicians reveal expressions of pain during the highest moments of artistic performance.

2 6 6 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

4. The scarcity of Mandekan texts in the African diaspora, as compared to general loanwords,can presumably be blamed on the decline of the Malian state after the 16th century (Ly-Tall1984). The few Mandekan texts collected by Turner (1949, 256-59) are Mende or Vai.

5. For the period 1790 to 1880… the quantitative analysis in the work of Bergad et al (1995,72; Barcia 1985, 50) provide a breakdown of slaves by classification as follows: Out of asample of 6,871 African slaves, 27 per cent were Calabarí, 28 per cent were ‘Congo’, 16 percent were Gangá, 9 per cent were Mandinga and 10 per cent others; these classifications werebroad and included many ethnic groups. The Calabarí classification embraced the Efik,Ibibio, Ibo, Efut, Qua, and all other ethnic groups who were transported through OldCalabar and the Bight of Biafra. (Ishemo 2002, 260, references corrected)

I assume that Bergad’s “Gangá” refers to Mandekan speakers, not to Central Africans as Ortíz(1924) supposed:

Aguirre Beltrán (1946, 120) señala que los Ganga formaban parte del grupo Mandinga,porque los árabes llamaron Gangara a los Mandé. (Pollak Eltz 1972, 30, reference corrected)

6. The numbers are calculated by Manfredi (1995). As to the labels, Bantu is technically asubset of Benue-Kwa, which is the union of Greenberg’s (1963) Kwa and Benue-Congo (Givón1975, 66; Williamson & Blench 2000, 17f., 27), but Bantu stands apart geographically and ontypological grounds. Besides cognation, Turner considered syntactic and phonetic features; seealso Mufwene (1985). Prof. Thornton (pers. comm) rightly notes that some Arabic names ofIslamic captives, mainly in the Mandekan and Bantu columns, may have been masked in theGullah outcomes in their Anglicized forms, e.g. with Ibrahim becoming Abraham or Abe.

7. A similar pattern occurs in Haiti, where vodun ritual terminology is mainly F`≠n-Gbå, butgeneral vocabulary is more evenly shared with Mandekan and Bantu (Comhaire-Sylvain 1955;Baker 1993).

8. A stray, undocumented reference to Cuban Abakuá “narratives in the Ibo language”(<http://www.africana.com/research/encarta/tt_563.asp>) is probably just a naïve inference fromerrorist labels. It’s equally hard to evaluate Thornton’s claim that “[n]o fewer than 60 percentof the Africans who formed the core of the surge of population in Virginia in the earlyeighteenth century were speakers of one or another dialect of the ⁄gbo language” (1998, 322,citing Kulikoff 1986 and re-cited in turn by Berlin 1998, 111). In Haiti too the record is mainlysilent. McDaniel (1998, 51-59) reports a handful of ⁄gbo-identified songs in the Caribbeanisland of Carriacou, totaling less than 20 distinct lines in all, with one possibly ⁄gbo item: thephrase ibo lele (also known as the name of a dance in Haiti). An expression Lã åle! is glossed byŸgwå (1999, 368) as an irregular imperative “Look!” In Grenada, McDaniel (1998, 52f.) quotesone song from Paul & Smith (1963, 7) in two forms. An untranslated stanza, transcribed “E-o,Ibo, Lélé-lélé / Ba ya mma ka-ki-ti/ Ba yo/ Ba ya mamma sa fa me/ Ibo” has the comment thatthe singer’s grandmother “…is I[g]bo family and she won’t live for the other nations, she willtrample them—that’s Ba kakite Ibo.” I see no way to derive this interpretation from the text onthe assumption that it was originally in ⁄gbo.

9. Both Gomez and Chambers raise the estimates of captive ⁄gbo speakers, thereby makingthe dearth of American ⁄gboisms even more mysterious.

10. The late 18th/early 19th century saw the vast majority of human exports from that region(·rójó 1987). On the revived Middle Belt theory cf. also Àfiògbo (1977 and pers. comm. cited byInikori 1988, 35 fn 33; ·bóchåre 1988, 50; Inikori 1992, 106 fn. 68). Other authorities arestudiously ambiguous, referring simply to “slaves… from the ⁄gbo hinterland” (Alagoa 1992,450). Many ⁄gbo-speaking captives remained in coerced labor in southeastern Nigerianhorticulture (Dike 1956; Jones 1961; Thomas-“mãagwaÅlú 1984), and it may also matter thatexported ⁄gbo-speaking captives were disproportionately young (J. Thornton, pers. comm.).

M A N F R E D I : S O U T H E A S T E R N N I G E R I A N D I A S P O R A 2 6 7

11. Lacking any deductive content, the creole ‘answer’ begs the noncorrespondence question.Like other ideologies, creoleness exists mainly in the eye of the beholder, even if that beholder islooking in a mirror, as when Asante’s quest for a “composite African… identification” (1990,9) entails “a creative quest for interpretation which ‘looks good’ ” (1990, 39).

12. E.g. “on average, one in four British African Caribbean men have a Y chromosome thattraces back to Europe rather than Africa” (<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2757525.stm>,<http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/genes/dna_detectives/african_roots/results.shtml>); and there is“an average of 30 per cent of White admixture in the Black population” of North America(Cavalli-Sforza 2000, 74).

13. In terms popularized by Boas, the comparative method has to consider if transmission ofa given cultural similarity is better explained as ‘evolution’ or ‘diffusion’. In genetics,transmissible traits are generated by the basic mechanisms of mutation, selection, migrationand drift. Here migration is of prime importance. Lamarckian genetics underplays mutation byassuming that characteristics acquired in one lifetime are heritable, but even for Darwinians theissue is blurred by gene-environment interactions (Levins & Lewontin 1985; Depew & Weber1995). Selection tends to be exaggerated by sociobiologists like Pinker (2002), cf. Roberts(2002). Implicitly in all comparisons, two other possibilities—chance resemblance anduniversals—need to be excluded before considering a causal inference, though this step is oftenskipped in folk theorising (some pertinent examples are given in the last section of this paper).

14. To take an example associated with Meillet, “Italo-Celtic” was a subgroup in the earlyhistory of the family, but not thereafter (Watkins 1966). The shift to vertical transmission isakin to Darwinian speciation, assumed to have a demographic cause (Mayr 1963, cited byLevins & Lewontin 1985, 294). For a sceptical view in linguistics, see Anttila (1972, 309).

15. See also Hale (1986). Mufwene (2001) challenges the limit on horizontal languagetransmission, in part with Afroamerican evidence relevant to the Cuban ⁄gbo case. From amore philosophical angle, Koster (1988, 1992, 1994) questions which aspects of language passbetween individuals (like genes), and which between groups (like intellectual property).Collective intellectual property is obviously a key concept for initiation societies like Abakuá;the notion, recently added to Western legal codes, that such property pertains to individuals,has less scientific plausibility. For “copyright-holder”, read “cultural expropriator”.

16. Endorsement of Herskovits doesn’t mean uncritical acceptance of current African Studiesin North America. While European Africanists draw on longstanding philological expertise,and on painfully acquired reservoirs of political sophistication about nation states, their U.S.counterparts by and large lack these resources, and tend to carry the short-run interests of theirCold War sponsors, especially in the U.S. Higher Education Title VI Area Studies fundingstream (Wallerstein 1997). Thus M˙ukoma wa Ng˙ug˙i is clearly right to insist that “…Westernscholarship on Africa needs to reinvent itself. Perhaps refusing to wear the boy-scout badge ofthe Africanist is a beginning” (2003, 14), but progressives are not the only ones thinking aboutreinvention. U.S. Title VI is now on the verge of official enlistment in the War on Terrorism(see <http://internationalstudies.uchicago.edu/titleVI.shtml> updated December 5, 2003).

17. Alam cites Wrigley who attributes English industrial takeoff, ahead of commercial leaderHolland, to “the move from an advanced organic to a mineral-based energy economy” (1988,104). Before then, African labor power was the main kinetic resource. The calculation changedwhen England began industrial use of fossil fuels circa 1800. The importance of plantationslavery in the transition of Euro-Atlantic feudal and mercantilist empires into liberal andcapitalist nation states is at least a corrolary of Williams’ thesis that “[i]t was the capitalaccumulated from the West Indian trade that financed James Watt and the steam engine”(1944, 102), cf. Wolf (1982, 200), Wallerstein (1989, 144ff.), Inikori (1992, 97), Bergquist(1996, 24-32) and Blackburn (1997, 572). English priority in abandoning muscle for fossil

2 6 8 C O N T O U R S 2 : 2

power bears on another dimension of Williams’ famous study: the relative weight of pecuniaryversus moralistic motives behind Britain’s 1807 anti-slavetrading law.

18. Generalizing from language to music, Herskovits goes on to propose that

in situations involving change, cultural imponderables are more resistant than are thoseelements of which persons are more conscious. It is important to stress in this connection,however, the distinction between this assumption and the hypothesis which holds thatmaterial culture is more acceptable under contact than non-material culture. (1945, 60)

He then tries to reconcile the two conflicting principles by restricting the first to “process” andthe second to “form”, but the attempt seems strained: both of them involve form as well asprocess, and the category of “material culture” assumes mind-body dualism, which isinconsistent with basic tenets of cognitive science like the computational theory of mentalrepresentations (Jordan & Russell 1999).

19. “…lingua eorum est facilis, vocatur lingua Licomin et est universalis in istis partibus,sicut latinum in partibus Europa”(Brásio 1960, 465, cf. Thornton 1988, 362 fn. 34). Thelocations included the ⁄jíbu (“Jabou”), WÅró (“Ouairai”) and ◊d£ (“Benin”) kingdoms. Alanguage of similar name—‡l∞kwumó—survives today not far east of ◊d£ in a few enclavesin the western ⁄gbo-speaking area now called Ãnú©ma (Thomas 1914; ‰nw¥ejó®gw∞ &·k£[h] 1981; ·rójó 1999, 66). Recently salvaged copies of 700 distinct wax cylinders of 2.5minutes’ duration, recorded by Thomas and presumably including ‡l∞kwumó, are beingdigitized in the British Library (http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive). It will help to checkThomas’ sample for any similarities between the southern Nigerian variety and Cuban Lucumíwhich exclude Yor∞bÄ dialects sensu stricto—confirming a horizontal transmission model.Lucumí would be expected to show more similarities to the language presently called I…êkiri(“Itshekiri”). As a possible case in point, I’m anecdotally informed that the expression ol∞k∞ mi(colloquially, ‘my tight friend’) is current as an I…êkiri greeting.

20. The same may have been true, somewhat later, of closely-related L§bangi (“Bobangi”),the precursor of Lingala (Harms 1981, 126; de Rop 1960, 17 cited by Harms 1981, 93). Adifference with L∞k∞mi in southern Nigeria is that, until direct colonization in the late 19thcentury, the greater linguistic cohesion of the west-central Bantu area (roughly Guthrie’s B andC zones) may have conferred less advantage on a Central African lingua franca as opposed toreliance on high mutual intelligibility among first languages (Harms 1981, 74, 92). Kik≠≠ng≠elements in Afrocuban Abakuá await expert attention.

21. See Schwegler (1996), Moñino & Schwegler (2002) on Kik˘≠≠ng≠ in Colombian Palenque.The impression of 17th century missionaries that Atlantic Africa contained between 13 and 30ethnolinguistic “nations” (Thornton 1992, 184 fn. 6, 185) may register no more than regionallingue franche in a “transnational community phenomenon” (YÄò 2001, 248). Attribution ofnational status to ethnic labels may be another case of Western errorism—a ‘blowback’ ofEuropean ideology (cf. Chatterjee 1986, Simpson 1988). Thornton skirts a sociologicaldefinition of nation à la Gellner (1967), or an economic one à la Wallerstein (1980, 144),relying instead on assumed cultural identity as manifested in “mutual intelligibility” betweenindividual languages (Thornton 1992, 187, fn. 14). However, overlap with a single lingua francais not known to be a better indicator of intelligibility than any arbitrary lexicostatistic score.

22. Confusion between the two functions may be responsible for certain European ideas citedapprovingly by Àfiògbo:

Baikie expressed the view that all the dialects spoken between Aro Chukwu and Old Calabarwere directly or indirectly connected with ⁄gbo. Major A.G. Leonard [1906, 43]… opined…‘that the languages spoken by the Ibibio, Efik, Andoni and others have all been derived fromIbo at some ancient period and that there is a distinct dialectal affinity between the Ijodialects of Oru, Brass, Ibeni and New Calabar, and the Isuama dialect of Ibo’ (1992c, 49).

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Àfiògbo goes on “to suggest that there was a time when a vague ideology of ‘pan-⁄gboness’floated generally between the Niger and the Cross River” (1992c, 50) and to blame scepticismby non-⁄gbo speaking historians like Noah (1980) on emotion from the Nigerian Civil War.Even at face value, this ‘pan-⁄gbo’ ideology begs the question of whether it was based on sharedlanguage, or—as seems likelier—on “[t]he part played by the Àr∂ in making inter-dependenceand peaceful co-existence possible through their trade routes, and the pax established throughthe widespread dread engendered in this whole area by the Long Juju” (1992c, 57).

23. E.g. at the business meeting of the ⁄gbo Studies Association in Boston on 1 November2003, ⁄gbo was used fitfully, mainly to score points against members of Nigeria’s current rulingparty in attendance. A resolution to adopt ⁄gbo as an official medium for Association meetingswas withdrawn after sharp debate. It’s a truism that such controversies could scarcely occur inan analogous gathering of Yor∞bÄ-speaking scholars abroad, despite the fact that mothertongue speaking fluency may not be significantly greater in the latter setting.

24. This sentence is a philological minefield. (i) Colonial rendering of Àr∂ as “Arochukwu” ishonored by most historians, e.g. Dókã & “kåji¥bÄ; Achebe reinforced it with the bilingual pun“arrow” in the title of his 1967 novel. Now there’s also the neologism “Ar®chukwu” (·k£ro1998, 46) with a hypercorrect “dotted o” in the second syllable replacing etymological “dottedu”. Given the town’s oracular industry, there’s no reason not to derive the name from the root-r∂ ‘propitiate a deity with sacrifice’ (Williamson 1972, 457; Ÿgwå 1999, 735). Remarkably, thefirst written source for the name (Clarke 1848, 73) renders it better than subsequent literature;see also Ilogu (1957, 100). (ii) The river which Europeans called “Niger” has essentially onesingle indigenous name (·himi, ·limini, ·rimili…) as it flows past towns speaking dozens ofBenue-Kwa languages. By contrast, indigenous nomenclature for the river baptized as the“Cross” (Rio da cruz) is diverse. At its mouth it’s called either ònyang or Äkpa, both meaninggenerically ‘river’ (B. Connell, O. Onyile pers. comm.). It is marked as “Akpa Efik” byPetermann (1863, plate 6 facing p. 200). A few hundred kilometers upstream at ÷h¥gb§(“Afikpo”) it’s called ÷ny§m Ákwu ‘Big ÷ny§m’—an expression which may reflect thedownstream origin of some ÷h¥gb§ lineages in Àr∂, bordering a lower tributary of the“Cross” whose name is spelled “Enyong” (tones unknown) by colonial sources like Jones(1986). Like its ”fik counterpart and possible namesake, the ÷h¥gb§ word ëny§m by itselfgenerically refers to ‘river’ as in the idiom -gw∞ ëny§m ‘swim’ (literally, ‘splash in river’), whichin Standard ⁄gbo is either -gw∞ mùrùn (‘splash in water’) or -gw∞ óyó (‘splash in stream’).

25. Details of Àr∂ hegemony remain controversial. Ÿjå©ma observes that “Àr∂ settlements…were not always motivated by commercial opportunities” (1994, 42), and Àfiògbo suspects that

…an overall picture of trade and trading life in south-central and south-eastern Nigeriabuilt up from competently prosecuted micro-studies is unlikely to uphold the idea,propagated by [Dókã’s] Trade & Politics, that the Àr∂ enjoyed in ⁄gboland a monopoly ofcommerce so complete as to be generally accepted as divinely appointed (1992c, 83).

Àr∂ had difficulty encroaching on the much older Úri kingdom and its óchi/©z® title system(‰nw¥ejó®gw∞ 1980, 26-30, 59-61; M. Ãnókp£ pers. comm.; Újó®kµ & Àn™zóe 1992, 198).The British overthrew Àr∂ and Úri in 1901 and 1911 respectively. Àfiògbo allows that most ofthe southern ⁄gbo-speaking area was culturally integrated under the “dominant influence” ofÀr∂ and “the growth in commerce which came to be associated with the trans-Atlantic systemfrom about the tail end of the 17th century” (1992b, 157). He gives this area the name “⁄gboÀbamaba (Äbamaba meaning secret societies)” (1992b, 154).

26. “Of the 150, about 45 were located in ⁄bibio, 38 in Ekoi and 67 in ⁄gbo territory”(“kåji¥bÄ 1992, 332 fn. 17) citing Umo (n.d.), see also <http://www.aro-okigbo.com/tribes html>and <http://www.arochukwu.org/thearosettlements.html>.

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27. “In ”kpe ceremonies at Àr∂chØkwu, many songs are sung in Cross River languages,although most members do not understand them” (Bentor 2002, 30; cf. Obuh 1984 on nearbysettlements). As to nsibiri/nsibidi/nchibidi, the name of the script, an Ejagham etymology hasbeen proposed “from nchibi meaning ‘to turn’—a symbolic reference to… esoteric, organizedand functional complexity…” (Onor 1994, 22). Leib & Romano cite the name of the gesturalcode as “egbe” (1984, 50), probably intending ãkpå (see next footnote).

28. Onor (1994, 22, 101) claims origins in the Ejagham-speaking area both for ºgbê—theEjagham name for what ”fik calls ãkpå—and for nsibiri. Similarly “[t]he most important men’ssociety in the Cross River area, Ekpe, had been sold by the Ekoi to the Efik at Old Calabar, whosold it to the Enyong, who sold it to others including the Aro, who in turn sold it to many othercommunities” (Northrup 1978, 173). Some say that ãkpå also had an ⁄bibio component: “Theslave trade was partly responsible for the reshaping of the Ibibio Ekpo society and the EkoiMgbe into the Ekpe at Calabar” (Alagoa 1992, 451), but this could be blowback from erroristswho changed ãkpå to “Egbo” (Jones 1956, passim), wrongly equated with ãkpo, the ⁄bibio wordfor ‘ancestor’ which also names a masked ancestral dance. (“kpå has no such aspect,apparently.) Both ”fik and ⁄bibio lack the gb phoneme (Simmons 1956b, 66; Essien 1985, 66),which is easier for Europeans than its voiceless counterpart kp. According to Nicklin &Salmons, the complementary distribution of ãkpå and ãkpo institutions in the region is bothlongstanding and continuing, with the exception of ‰d®n (“Oron”) where “ãkpå seems tohave been the major male cult at the advent of the colonial era” (1984, 33). See also:

The greatest difference between the mainland Ibibio and the Efik is the absence of EkpoOnyoho among the Efik. When they finally settled at their present site, they met the Efut andthe Qua whose instrument of government was the Ekpe secret society. The Efik adapted theEkpe secret society in preference to Ekpo Onyoho which was in their opinion less powerfulthan ekpe in the control of the large slave population among the Efik. (Ád§ 1976, 169f.)

29. I- and E-language need not be distinct in this function. In the ⁄gbo-speaking area, £lu theargot of ©z® initiation of the Úri Kingdom makes do with ⁄gbo ingredients (‰nw¥ejó®gw∂1980; Manfredi 1991, 265-73), and the same is presumably true for the “secret codes” of the‡ka (“Awka”) ironsmith guild (Dókã 1974 cited by “zãÅnú 2002, 7). Similarly, Akuetey findsno non-”Šå material in the speech of YåŠågbå vodun initiates, despite an explicit “no ”Šå-speaking rule” (1998/99, 83 ). Farther afield, the Italian Valle dell’Adda supplies another case ofdivergence, where shoemakers’ jargon draws heavily on German lexical items (Bracchi 1987).

30. They continue on the same page: “In many wards, however, the highest grade was openonly to the Amadi [‘freeborn’].” Mobility may have been even greater in 19th century “OldCalabar” where “[s]everal slaves actually purchased entry to the governing council of ãkpå”(Latham 1971, 601). Uya (1987, 39) endorses Latham’s view that the Ndem “tutelary deity”(1973, 146) was gradually supplanted by ãkpå in the 17th and 18th centuries as ”fik economyturned from local estuary fishing to long distance middleman-ism.

31. McWhorter’s alleged non-creole symptoms comprise lexical tone, overt inflection andsemantically-opaque derivational morphology.

32. Bickerton’s five primary characteristics at least share something empirical: they allappeared together in his paradigm example, the abrupt pidgin-to-creole transition of Hawai’ianEnglish (1981, 17). Of course this clustering doesn’t mean the five are necessarily limited tocreoles (They aren’t) and Bickerton is aware of the alternative explanation:

Orthodox generativists… could predict no more of a creole than that it should not violateany universal constraint. However, if all creoles could be shown to exhibit an identity farbeyond the scope of chance, this would constitute strong evidence that some geneticprogram common to all members of the species was decisively shaping the result. (1981, 42)

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The “if” not having panned out, Bickerton is now an “orthodox generativist” in the aboveterms when he defines creoles as possessing five properties “of natural language” tout court(1990, 171). Calvin & Bickerton (2000, 250) blandly declare that “creoles have the features ofuniversal grammar”. But Bickerton still thinks that “acquisition of Haitian Creole would reachthe level of mature native competence on the order of (at least) three or four years sooner thanacquisition of English” (1999, 67)—still assumuing, therefore, that Haitian is a “default” or“unmarked” instantiation of the human faculté du langage. But the link is not necessary:Mufwene (1999, 99-110) gives a consensus list of 7 “creole” features, all of which can plausiblyregarded as unmarked, not in a UG sense, just relative to “the ecology consisting of thelinguistic materials (homogeneous or heterogeneous) the learner encounters” (1999, 121 fn. 3).

33. A fallback position, consistent with intuitions presumably shared by Bickerton andMcWhorter, would be that creoles exclude certain morphosyntactic types, e.g. polysynthesis(Baker 1996). This would be reasonable, except that traditional, macro-typological classes likepolysynthetic languages have proved no easier to delimit than creoles, in other words adding asecond circularity does not offer an escape route from the first one.

34. Chomsky’s E-language recalls Kiparsky’s “external evidence (including both behavioraland historical evidence)” (1973, 87), but the two linguists invest this type of data withrespectively low and high relevance in the task of evaluating competing theories.

35. Genetic transmission of ancestral languages, though false, is part of folk belief as shownby immigrant surprise that children don’t automatically inherit their parents’ linguisticabilities. A remnant of this belief survives at the core of Bickerton’s creole theory, which holdsthat specific a grammatical pattern is transmitted genetically, in the absence of consistentE-language cues to the child. In his words, “all, or at least a substantial part, of the grammar ofa language can be produced in the absence of the generation-to-generation transmission ofparticular languages that is a normal characteristic of our species” (1984, 174). He calls thispattern a “bioprogram”; related ideas in language acquisition theory include the subset principle(Berwick 1985) and default parameter setting (Hyams 1987). Muysken points out that all theseapproaches rely on the subsequently-abandoned idea of syntactic markedness:

Perhaps the whole original notion that creoles are unmarked systems was misguided, but sofar it remains as the most substantial contribution of Bickerton to the field. Now there is nobase for it. (1988, 306)

36. Hale’s generalization—that zero-causative unergatives are excluded from adult languages—is based on a sample comprising English, Miskitu, Navajo and Basque. With familiar caveats(Fodor 1970), a logical equivalent can always be expressed periphrastically, either by so-calledanalytic causatives (make/let/have me giggle) or by multi-clause expressions (cause me to giggle,bring it about that I giggle). In Modern Hebrew, zero-causatives are claimed to overapply inadult speech to include unergatives (Borer & Wexler 1987, 159), which wouldcounterexamplify Hale (1996) assuming (i) that binyan 5 (schematized as hiCCiC) is inherentlycausative and (ii) that the causative-inchoative relationship is syntactic. However, both of theseassumptions are questioned by Arad, who claims that “there is no [+causative] binyan” (2003,182) and that “the non-causative and the causative verb are both [independently] derived fromthe root and not from one another” (2003, 333). Borer’s (2003) analysis of Hebrew lexicalalternations is also consistent with Hale (1996), but without Arad’s appeal to DistributedMorphology (Halle & Marantz 1993)—a phonological theory of affixation.

37. Adult ⁄gbo filters out zero-causatives, even those translating English unaccusatives likebreak (NwÄchukwu 1987). Instead, alternating causatives in ⁄gbo take the form of so-calledbipositional verbs (or V-V compounds, cf. Lord 1975). This gap does not threaten Hale’s (1996)generalization, but it remains puzzling. Hale et al. (1995) sketch a solution in terms of lexical

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redundancy, pending study of the development of causatives in ⁄gbo-speaking children, as wellas reconsideration of the unaccusative/unergative distinction (cf. “mãnanj® 1984).

38. On logical grounds, UG is further idealized as the “initial state S0” of the language faculty(Chomsky 1986, 25), however this begs the question of maturation (Borer & Wexler 1987) aswell as the markedness assumption discussed above.

39. A possible response is that Haitian or whichever other language lacks the prototypicalcreole structures had to that extent “decreolized” (Bickerton 1974; 1981, 46f.), but this insulatesthe claim of a creole type from disproof, pending discovery of some way to know that any givendata is not decreolized. The circularity is blatant in the following quotation:

The more we strip creoles of these more recent developments, the more we factor outsuperficial and accidental features, the greater are the similarities that reveal themselves.(Bickerton 1981, 132)

Another response is that the alleged status of “creoles” as “the world’s simplest grammars” isnot a matter of “synchronic theory” at all but is purely “historical” (McWhorter 2001a; 2001b,398, 411). An appeal to history as the unique testing ground for creole uniqueness concedesDeGraff’s point that the relevance of creole is limited to to E-language, at which point anymention of “synchrony” (McWhorter 2000) is surprising. The same objections can’t logicallyapply to Mufwene’s critique, which McWhorter has not addressed so far as I know.

40. Also Mufwene (1996, 107; 1998, 324) quoted by DeGraff (2001a, 285); Mufwene (2000).41. According to Doroszeweski (1933), cited by Hiersche (1972, 13), de Saussure’s shift

between 1907 and ’08 was influenced by Durkheim’s views on “collective consciousness”.Remarkably within mainstream generative grammar, something close to Durkheim’s “idéationcollective” (1898, 301 fn. 1) has been rehabilitated by Koster (1988, 1992, 1994). Accepting UGas an innate constraint on natural language grammars passing through the acquisition filter,Koster nevertheless endorses Wittgenstein’s objection to the view that knowledge of anyparticular language fully coincides with individual psychology; on the contrary, it also has asupra-individual dimension because the mind, unlike the brain, “cannot be sharplydistinguished from the external memory” (Koster 1992, 5), and external memory necessarilyhas a “public” or cultural context—for Durkheim, “collective”; for Mufwene, “communal”.

42. Both Mufwene and DeGraff endorse the views of Chaudenson (1992), in ways beyond thescope of my discussion here.

43. Paternity of creole linguistics conventionally belongs to Schuchardt (1882).44. Thésée (1986) gives etymologies for seven personal names, e.g. “Houanizei” could be

“Nwanyizie” (orthographic NwÄÅnyúzóe) or “Nwanyieze” (NwÄÅnyúãzå ). Unambiguouscases are Nw£kãdû (“Ouquédi”) and Òd∂b¥ósi (“Oudoubichi”).

45. Àfiògbo evokes, without elaborating, an ethnic distinction “between Àgbaaja and ⁄sØ atthe pan-⁄gbo level” (1992b, 147).

46. A near neighbor of Àr∂, mentioned by Ilogu (1957, 107), “kåji¥bÄ (1992, 316) and·rójó (1990, 136). Nair (1975, 8) cites hilarious testimony, collected from Etubom EdedemEkpenyong Oku by Commissionner A.K. Hart:

The ”fiks were an oriental tribe whose home was in Palestine. …When the ”fiks reachedEastern Nigeria settled at Ututu in the ⁄[g]bo country. The people of Ututu called the ”fikimmigrants Eburutu, a corruption of the words “Hebrew and Ututu” the former word beinga reference to the ”fik oriental origin. (1964, 29)

A few pages later, Hart flips Etubom’s submission to interpret the appellation Eburutu ashaving been made “presumably in derision of the ”fik claim of Hebrew descent” (1964, 37).More trenchant, but equally improbable.

47. Also in this hemisphere, non-⁄gbo speakers were lumped into the ⁄gbo category:

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[W]hites in the British Caribbean and mainland colonies used ‘Ebo’ or ‘Ibo’ to include the‘Ibo, Ibibio and Efik and Cross River peoples’ and rarely used and little understood themeaning behind names such as ‘Calabar’ and ‘Moko’. (Northrup 2000, 14)

Something similar happens in modern Nigeria: „m®ruyi (2004) recalls stereotyping the lateKenule Saro-Wiwa as “⁄gbo” in 1962 when they met as new students in University of ⁄bÅdÅncateteria queue, based on Ken’s preference for rice instead of ÅmÅlÅ (yam porridge). Saro called„m® “Yor∞bÄ” for making the opposite dietary selection. They soon discovered a sharedpolitical identity as Nigerian “minorities”, respectively ◊d£- and ·g§nò-speaking, and bothfound a political home during the 1964 federal election campaign in the Northern People’sCongress, not in the South’s dominant Yor∞bÄ and ⁄gbo regional parties, AG and NCNC.

48. “zå & Manfredi (2001) cite non-ethnic glosses of the term ⁄gbo, including ‘community’and ‘inland dwellers’, which remain salient in personal names and other fixed phrases.

49. Ardener (1968, 117 fn. 41) adds a further Dutch wrinkle. As if to prove the potential ofthis errorist “dud” to cause civilian havoc, witness the continued controversy over governmentrecognition of the ”fik chieftaincy title formerly known as the Obong of Old Calabar:

The real meaning of the word ‘Calabar’ remains uncertain even now. It is not indigenousbut is an imposition. [M]uch of the records that were relied on for what has so far passed forher history, were shrouded in constant mix-ups, mis-information and deliberate distortionof facts. …When the epithet ‘Old’ was dropped in 1904, and ‘Old Calabar’ was renamed‘Calabar’ it did not by implication extend the jurisdiction of the Efik chieftain to include theQuas and the Efuts. …Never has any Qua man called Calabar ‘Obio Efik’ (Efik Town)…(QCCA 2003, 5, 23, 32)

On p. 35, the same memo portentously alludes to an analogous renaming in the early 1960’swhen the western delta was in the Western Region (under Yor∞bÄ-speaking administration)and the paramount title “OlØ of I…êkiri” (an ethnic category) was inflated to “OlØ of Warri”(a geographical one). The change inflamed local rivalry that continues today as one of severallow-intensity wars which span the impoverished, oil-producing Niger delta.

Compensating somehow for the heavy political load carried by the term Calabar, is the lightlinguistic weight of folk etymologies like the following:

The early Portuguese explorers of the period saw the left bank of the Calabar River close tothe estuary settled; and it was they, we gather, who gave the name “Calabaros” to the earlyinhabitants of the Bight of Biafra. The name “Calabar” is sometimes interpreted by some assignifying “calm bar”, because the bar of the river is often naturally calm and as a whole notmuch ruffled by the wind. (Aye 1967, 4)

50. Simmons’ report is corroborated a century earlier by Petermann (1863, plate 6 facing p.200); see also Nair (1975, 190). “Abakpa” has also been cited as the name of an apparently non-ãkpå mask “in the Ogoja area” (Nicklin & Salmons 1984, 36) and occurs as a place name insome northeast ⁄gbo-speaking settlements with slave-trade connections, e.g. Ãbakpa Nókã.

51. Cuban [ku] is the outcome of Yor∞bÄ [kp] before a front unrounded vowel; before aback rounded vowel the result is [p], e.g. Yor∞bÄ [otØrØkp™n ] (a chapter of IfÄ, spelledotØrØp™n because Yor∞bÄ lacks a [p], cf. ÃjÅyó 1960) becomes in Cuba [otrupo(n)] not[otrukuo(n)]. Either treatment is possible before [a]: the Yor∞bÄ exclamation [hããkpÅ]—spelled HããpÅ! in Nigeria—comes out in Cuban Lucumí as either [epua] or [ekua].

52. Not the same as “Annang, the Qua (Kwa) of early colonial records” (Àfiògbo 1974, 71).53. It seems that Calabar inhabitants avoid orthographic confusion with another group called

Kwa by resorting to the qu digraph which is otherwise unused:

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Calabar was not the only name to worry nineteenth century ethnographers. There were alsothe Kwa (or Qua). One group of Kwa was a subtribe of the Ejagham Ekoi which, withanother tribal fragment of the Efut, were the original inhabitants of Old Calabar. There werealso a few villages on the Cameroons River, unrelated to the Ekoi, who also called themselvesKwa, and finally there was the Western or Anang division of the Ibibio whose Europeanname was the Kwa and later the Qua Ibo, presumably to distinguish them from the otherKwa. (Jones 1963, 21)

Folk etymology derives the place name from personal names rather than the reverse:

It is said that the Qua got their name from the Portuguese traders who called them thus afterone of the chiefs Oqua. …Okwa is still a common name among the people of Qua Town. InEfik, Qua Town is called Akwa Obio (Big Town). (Nair 1972, 30f. fn 3).

The modern opacity of ”fik personal names, even to fluent speakers, is historically related toa process Aye calls “Anglification” whereby

Orok was changed into Duke; Efiom was anglicised as Ephraim; Akabom, Ekpenyong,Asibong became Cobham, Young and Archibong respectively. Attempts were even made toanglicise Asuquo as Escor.” (1967, 87; cf. Simmons 1956b, 69)

Place names are similar: “Guinea Company is the English name for the ”fik town of Adiabo,situated on the west bank of the Calabar River…” (Simmons 1956b, 70), etc.

54. Cited by Nair (1975, 190) as occurring on p. 566.55. In Crabb’s transcription, barred <i> is a centralized high vowel.56. As a non-specialist, I may have rediscovered something obvious to cognoscenti. The three

labels would probably not have continued to lead separate lives in Nigerian history books, butfor the political marginality of the bearers vis-à-vis their ”fik speaking neighbors. One morestray gloss—of uncertain provenance, due to the vagaries of the document itself—which maysupport the above argument is a 1786 diary entry, cited by an ”fik-speaking historian, writtenby someone variously identified as “Antera Duke or Ntiero Edem Effiom” and referring to“Ekoi (Coqua)” (Asuquo 1978, 50). My interpretation of this doublet is that the parenthesizedmaterial represents the pidgin English transcription of the original manuscript, now lost (cf.Simmons 1956b), while the label Ekoi is Asuquo’s emendation.

57. The story comes full circle, or at least is further complicated, by the tradition that “[t]heEfik… had left Ibom [near Àr∂] because of wars involving groups characterized as Akpa”(Alagoa 1992, 450). From this geographic origin, Àfiògbo draws the further conclusion that“[t]he ”fik were originally an ⁄[g]bo clan living on the boundary between the ⁄[g]bo and the⁄bibio where they progressively acquired ⁄bibio cultural traits…” (1965, 272). However, thisdoes not seem like the only way to explain the opinion that “the ”fik despise the ⁄bibio” (1965,271), normal ethnic rivalry being more plausible, cf. Ád§ (1976, 160f.).

58. Cognates exist in other Benue-Kwa languages, but the ⁄gbo form is the closest.59. Ÿgwå’s gloss of ChØkwu abúaÅma as “God the provider” (1999, 3) is tendentious. The

most recognizeable morpheme in the epithet is - búÄ ‘come’ which, NwÄ™ga observes, happensto be the root on which all ⁄gbo dialects build an agent noun meaning ‘stranger/visitor’.Újó®kµ (<http://www.wku.edu/~johnston.njoku/arochukwu/>) reports that Àr∂ tourguidesrefer to “Chukwu Obioma”—which could simply be mistranscribed if it doesn’t reflect a newfolk etymology of ‘kind-hearted’. Újó®kµ elsewhere has “Chukwu Abiama (Great and All-Knowing God)” (<http://www.wku.edu/~johnston.njoku/arochukwu/history/>), again withoutetymological foundation. The same source cites the oracle name as “Ibin Ukpabi”—anunconventional segmentation with an enticingly Oriental flavor recalling Ibn Khaldun etc.

60. As noted by NwÄ™ga (1984, 44ff.), the wit to invent a sky god with which to dupe one’sneighbors was not limited to Àr∂, which was preceded in the business by Úri centuries before:

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from Jeffreys (1934), ‰nw¥ejó®gw∂ (1980, 41) quotes an Úri proverb, Âf© Ånyù jò eló ⁄gbo(roughly, ‘We use an ancestral shrine to scam inland dwellers’). Oral tradition contains manytexts in which the character of ChØkwu figures as just another of the dramatis personæ, andone who can himself be duped on occasion. It is also fascinating to read, in the context ofmissionary rivalry, that the adoption of the Àr∂ cult name ChØkwu by Catholic translators“was why the Protestants had changed to Chónãkå though the Catholics who came later toÂnúcha still used ChØkwu” (NwÄ™ga 1984, 26). The neologistic formation of Chónãkå is wellcritiqued by Ãchebã (1975).

61. Westermann & Ward rephrase the rule as follows: “in certain dialects of I[g]bo, …a rolledr is used between all vowels except i and [ú], where the flapped sound is used” (1933, 75). Itclearly matters which dialects if any besides Àr∂ are being referred to; Ward (1941, 35) doesn’telaborate. Another phonetic feature which has been at least casually described in Àr∂, andwhich may register in Abakuá (e.g. in the name Abakuá itself, among other items) is “theinterchangeability of the sounds kp and kw in local pronunciation” (Matthews 1927, quoted byÀfiògbo 1981a, 223). The reliability of Matthews’ perception of consonants is unknown,though he wins points for correcting the errorist spelling of the root vowel of the word Àr∂itself (Àfiògbo 1981a, 218). But the change of kp to kw is also found in Cuban Lucumí (seeabove), so it most likely reflects a more general type of phonetic restructuring.

62. A current replicant of the ‘Heegbrew meme’ appears in a pamphlet from the NationalAfrican Language Resource Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which refers inseriousness (and with blithe disregard for ⁄gbo orthography) to a historical scenario whereby

…the Igbo are descendants of early Jews because most of their customs and practices aresimilar to those of the Jews. A few examples are the celebration of the newborn (Omugwo),naming ceremony (Igu aha), marriage ceremonies (Ilu nwaanyi), atoning for accidentalkilling (Ikwa ochu) and many others.(<http://african.lss.wisc.edu/nalrc/prog-serv/Map/Brochures/Igbo.pdf>)

63. AbóΩb©lÄ (1999) rejects Peel’s more ambitious claim, that the wide ethnic category ofYor∞bÄ was not merely exploited by 19th-century SÅr£ (returned Sierra Leonean) converts intheir protestant self-fashioning, but was actually created by them as a spinoff of bible-translation into the dialect of fallen Ây©. But Peel himself notes that the IfÄ corpus of oracularpoetry (E-language) was cognitively salient, to the point of official scandal, for the SÅr£missionary converts E. LójÄd∞ and J. Johnson (2000, 302). That IfÄ’s standardizing normsaren’t literate was irrelevant in a preindustrial context; they sufficed for political agitation perse, as in the oratorical success of Chief S.L.A. Akónt©lÄ, Aw£l©w™’s nemesis from the Ây©-derived town of ·gb£m™…© who excelled in babalÄwo-like wordplay (cf. Â…Ønt£kØn 1984,22). Similarly, Adãgb®lÄ (2003) finds that d∞n-dØn drummed surrogate speech reflects Ây©dialect even in non-Ây© areas, again suggesting pre-literate standardization.

64. The story, recorded from Gullah-speakers on the Georgia coast (W.P.A. 1940), has beenreenacted by Latter-Day Heegbrews (<http://www.biafraland.com/Ibo%20Landings.htm>,<http://authors.aalbc.com/juliedashchattext.htm>,<http://biafranet.com/pressreleases/Ekwenche/2002sep30.html>).

65. Genetic narcissism recurs in the National African Language Resource Center blurb, citedabove, which declares that “because Igbo speakers have permeated the world’s societies in manydifferent ways, they have also increased in population by childbirth and marriage”(<http://african.lss.wisc.edu/nalrc/prog-serv/Map/Brochures/Igbo.pdf>). It should be obvious todiasporan language teachers that ability to speak ⁄gbo is not an inherited condition.

66. At the 2003 African Studies Association meeting in Boston, Prof. “mãny®nµ graciouslyrecanted his view “that ⁄gbo literature is for the most part written in English” (1978, 189)—anotion swiftly rejected by “mãnanj® (1982, 47f.). With respect to the present discussion,

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however, “mãny®nµ ’s original position has the merit of diagnosing a real ambivalence, on thepart of ⁄gbo-speaking authors, to the choice of any particular linguistic medium of expression,so long as their texts “remain essentially ⁄gbo in idiom and content” (1978, 189).

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